So there I was, browsing the DW forums on my PDA (which I use for the greater portion of my e-book/fanfiction reading pleasure), when it happened: DW5 chapter 3 was released. Palms began to sweat; excitement filled the air. I scrambled for my stylus and tapped the link with bated breath.
It was completely unreadable.
Characters were strewn hither, thither, and yon. Lines divided in places unintelligible. Vast swaths of color obscuring text left and right (but mostly left). And the font... dear god, the hideous fixed-width font....
Well. Enough melodrama.
The sixty-five character per line thing was great when Pine and Lynx were the epitome of internet clients, but times change. Eighty-column fixed-width is no longer the lowest common denominator. In fact, there may be no lowest common denominator -- devices with web browsers keep getting smaller and smaller. (One might assume, however, that a cellphone with a 160x128 screen is the absolute smallest that anyone remotely rational would even attempt to use.) And since every web browser on the planet is capable of reflowing text to fit the screen, there's no longer any excuse for forcing fixed-width on a web page.
The 1600x5 background image (which looks kinda hokey when it repeats horizontally for those of us with monitors larger than 1600 pixels wide) renders text illegible when small-screen browsers unfold tables to make them easier to read, resulting in the black text overlapping the dark green swath. Sure, we could hunt through the menus for the option to disable images (and thus rendering links unusable), but we shouldn't have to -- particularly since it would be trivial to replace it by slapping a background color onto the table which holds the link images. The 1000 pixel wide GIF containing nothing but heavily-aliased white text on green background isn't quite so much of an issue, but it could still be cleaned up in much the same way.
Ergh... cutting off now before I go into a rant against anything and everything arbitrarily fixed-width on the World Wide Web. I guess I just finally hit critical mass on the issue. (o/~ Wide screen on the desktop, small screen in my hand / here i am, stuck in the middle with you. o/~ )
It was completely unreadable.
Characters were strewn hither, thither, and yon. Lines divided in places unintelligible. Vast swaths of color obscuring text left and right (but mostly left). And the font... dear god, the hideous fixed-width font....
Well. Enough melodrama.
The sixty-five character per line thing was great when Pine and Lynx were the epitome of internet clients, but times change. Eighty-column fixed-width is no longer the lowest common denominator. In fact, there may be no lowest common denominator -- devices with web browsers keep getting smaller and smaller. (One might assume, however, that a cellphone with a 160x128 screen is the absolute smallest that anyone remotely rational would even attempt to use.) And since every web browser on the planet is capable of reflowing text to fit the screen, there's no longer any excuse for forcing fixed-width on a web page.
The 1600x5 background image (which looks kinda hokey when it repeats horizontally for those of us with monitors larger than 1600 pixels wide) renders text illegible when small-screen browsers unfold tables to make them easier to read, resulting in the black text overlapping the dark green swath. Sure, we could hunt through the menus for the option to disable images (and thus rendering links unusable), but we shouldn't have to -- particularly since it would be trivial to replace it by slapping a background color onto the table which holds the link images. The 1000 pixel wide GIF containing nothing but heavily-aliased white text on green background isn't quite so much of an issue, but it could still be cleaned up in much the same way.
Ergh... cutting off now before I go into a rant against anything and everything arbitrarily fixed-width on the World Wide Web. I guess I just finally hit critical mass on the issue. (o/~ Wide screen on the desktop, small screen in my hand / here i am, stuck in the middle with you. o/~ )
