Quick poll on readability issues

[astolat]

Okay, so I have been fighting with the new website a bit, and so far I have only been able to get one of two things to work for the individual stories, either centering or variable width. That is -- originally I wanted to make it so that the text would have a maximum width so it wouldn't go sprawling all across the browser, but I wanted to leave it

Comments

[prillalar]

A couple of things:

* the page should have a DOCTYPE so that browsers know which version of the spec you're using -- HTML 4.01 Transitional is probably your best choice

* this line in the CSS is invalid: width: expression(document.body.clientWidth > 500? "500px": "auto" ) -- you can't use JS (There may be something like this in CSS 3, but it's not prime time yet.)

* to center variable width page content, set the left and right margins of the body to a percentage (or do the same with padding, depending on where you want that red line)

* to center fixed-width page content, set the left and right margins of the container to "auto". Only this won't work in IE 5.x, so you have to use a hack to get around it: text-align: center on the body and then text-align: left (or whatever) on the container

* IE6 does not honour max-width, sadly. I can't remember offhand if there's a good hack for it.

Just ping me if you want any help with this; this is what I do all day.

[astolat]

Hee, that expression thing in the CSS is the IE hack for max-width. *g* Thanks so much for the help -- the percentage thing may be a good compromise solution.

[minotaurs]

Definitely left-justified. Centered text is fine for small bits, but for large stuff (anything more than a couple of lines), left-justified is easier to read. If you want to center the left-justified block of text on the page, set your block to 100% and your margins to be equal one another, ie:

width: 100%;
margin-left: 20%;
margin-right: 20%;

[penguinparity]

My monitor is set to 1680 x 1050 resolution, so I'm not such a personal fan of maximum width caps. I don't browse with my firefox set to fullscreen, so when I want to make something narrower, I just change the window size. Even with my browser only taking up about 1/2 of my screen width, the text of stories on your website as it is currently set up only fills about 1/3 of my browser (so...uh...quick, math time, a 1/6 of my screen?). Which, when I'm trying to read a story longer than 500 words is really kind of annoying. :/

[paranoidangel42]

Entirely useless, but ooh, someone else with the same resolution as me! I don't make my Firefox window full screen either because then I just wouldn't be able to read anything from one side to the other!

[wistful_fever]

Your Due South Vide: "Zebra" has been spotlighted at vidder_weekly.

[sheron]

[abbylee]

That's one of the reasons why I love firefox - you can easily resize any font even when it's expressed in pixels. So on days when I want giant text, I can get it.

[sheron]

[abbylee]

Shortcuts to urls? As in "copy shortcut" in ie?
In firefox you can "copy link location" which does the same thing.

I always get weirded out now when I browse in ie instead of firefox, because I'm so used to the tabs and adblock and easily changing font sizes.