I’m not sure what you’re suggesting, but I typically use a, uh, wide stance with browsers. As per my screenshot.
Some sites understand that and they’re all like, hey, cool, we’ll take up as much space as you want to give us. Not many, to be fair, but some. Must be all those usability studies you mentioned. But fully dynamic width is one of oh, maybe, two things I miss about vBulletin. I’ve adjusted just fine to the fixed width, but it’s still weird to me that Discourse is more than happy to break its own rule with the preview pane. Suddenly, it’s all like, hey, cool, we’ll take up as much space as you want to give us!
Yeah, but allowing text lines to become extremely long because you don’t know any better isn’t really design per se, it’s just sloppy programmer thinking.
If a new piece of UI suddenly appeared in the margins as you make the browser wider, sure, that’s a responsive design choice. But simply going from
Normal length line of text
to
Giant extremely very ultra mega hyper super tremendous insanely crazily loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong line of text
… isn’t design, just a bad case of programmer “design”.
Oh yes, on iPad. I can fix that in a minute here, just a z-order issue. iPad isn’t considered “mobile” so did not get that z-order fix yet. Sorry about that.
It doesn’t, though. The reason why the primary reading viewport is a fixed width is that it’s more difficult to read very wide lines, and Discourse prioritizes the reading experience. The posting and preview panes are each the proper reading width.
That doesn’t mean other page elements can’t use more of your screen’s width. You aren’t reading freeform text in those fields, so they can be used for other page elements like chat windows, preview panes, etc.
I really don’t. I recall often making the browser window narrower so that it would be easier to read Qt3. I like the white space, too. It’s easier for my eye to jump between various page elements because they stand out a bit more.
Agreed. I installed a Readable bookmarklet and I used it pretty heavily on websites that were text heavy that didn’t actually make it easy to read things.
I was always looking forward to the future when I’d either have a wide enough monitor or a VR headset in which to see every post as it was intended to be read, that is, on a single line.
Tom, is there still a place where one might just donate a single sum? I don’t see a donate button anywhere. But since I will soon be able to do that, rather than be in a monthly Patreon kind of thing, what would I do?
You have better luck than me: I still never have seen them, anywhere!
(though sometimes, very rarely, my browser prompts me to save some shockwave flash file when visiting the site, so maybe that is that?)
