feedback on new wiki theme

Jordan Mantha laserjock at ubuntu.com
Fri Sep 5 22:10:24 UTC 2008


On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 14:31 -0700, Jordan Mantha wrote:
>> This is a very nice theme and looks more professional and usable to
>> me. My only complaint is that it's rather narrow on all my computers
>> (widescreen laptop and LCD displays). It looks like we're losing an
>> awful lot of screen real estate. Is it possible to make it a fluid
>> rather than fixed width theme? http://www.ubuntu.com has the same
>> issue. It ends up looking rather cramped on all my computers and more
>> like a blog site (perhaps because of the ubiquity of some of
>> Wordpresses past default themes :-) ).
>
> There is one usability issue with letting the content get too wide,
> however.  If you've ever used LaTeX, it defaults to something like 65
> char/line.  The reason is that as the lines get longer, it becomes more
> difficult to track which line one is reading.  Upon reaching the end of
> the line, the eyes must scroll much further left to find the beginning
> of the next line, and the longer the lines are the harder it is to track
> and the more likely one is to do that thing where a line is read twice
> or a line is skipped.  You'll also notice this principle in how
> newspapers and textbooks do columns.

Right, I'm certainly aware of that usability issue, but I think it's
better left to the user to decide the width than to keep it fixed.

-Jordan




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