Beauty and readability are different notions
By glazou on Monday 29 December 2003, 11:35 - CSS and style - Permalink
Redesign. The word is everywhere. It seems that all famous online names have to redesign their blog from time to time. Zeldman for instance did it again recently. For the 3rd time this year, apparently. Yes, Zeldman knows about Web design using CSS. But I can't help asking myself a question about what he did: why is the content area so narrow? On my wide screen, less than a third of canvas' width is used for content... That's a LOT of blank space and obliges the reader to scroll vertically.
Comments
Ah, then I'm not alone... I have a 21" screen, and I don't understand why people keep telling that fixed width designs like zeldman's are better for readability... Actually, the lines are so short, everything looks so "condensed" that I'm having trouble reading it... Besides he's using font-size: small, ignoring my preferences, which makes it even harder to read...
Use tables. They produce flexible layouts and do not overflow if you don't try to hard
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Uh, daniel seems to use font-size:smaller rather than 100% of the user's default font size. Also, I think that, although fixed-width (or rather 'limited width' since they can use max-size to scale nicley at smaller screen sizes) layouts require more scrolling, they are easier to read - you don't have to move your eye across the screen so much. A quick search turned up a study 216.239.59.104/search?q=c... (google cache only, the original site seems to be down), suggesting that reading performance for both wide and narrow lines is similar, but most people prefer reading narrow lines. There is certianly no law that states the optimum design is the one that makes most use of the avaliable screen space.
it's more readable (less stress) because the eye muscles don't have to move from side to side. maximum readability is achieved in columns of text <4 inches wide (imagine a newspaper that went across the page). then again, studies show white on black is slightly easier on the eyes... too bad it looks fugly.
Le problème de lisibilité est bien quelquechose de personnel. J'ai laissé le mien en fluide pour les utilisateurs, mais en fait je ne suis pas satisfait.
Car en revanche je préferre les lignes courtes.
So I guess I'm in the category of newspaper readers :p
In fact, I wish we had a feature in browsers for CSS.
lists.w3.org/Archives/Pub...
To select CSS like we do for cookies