D forums now live!

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Sunday, 19 February 2012 at 16:16:29 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> That's the latest Firefox release, I have not used scripts to 
> modify the page rendering, I have used two Firefox options 
> present in its regular graphical menu. Other people where I 
> work, and friends or mine, use similar settings. Firefox 
> designers have added those options, and have put them well 
> visible in that menu, because there are enough people that use 
> or want to use them.

Using browser features that override page styles does not put you 
in a position for complaining about the resulting page style. 
Surely you'd at least agree that it is impossible to create a 
non-trivial web site that will look good with any combination of 
user style customization?

> The purpose of PDF viewers is to show a formatted document, 
> where the position, color and shape of every glyph is decided 
> by the person that has created the page (or by her software). 
> HTML documents, by their nature, specify mostly the contents 
> and the semantics of the page, and leave most of the 
> presentation to the browsers. There are browsers that even read 
> the page aloud, so the "look" of the page is an audio signal. A 
> person that writes HTML pages has to keep in account, as 
> example, that up to 8% of male viewers are color blind, this is 
> not a Firefox option, unfortunately.

I don't see how this applies. Text is visible and accessible to 
screen readers, and there are no issues with color. You are 
complaining about *style* but bringing *accessibility* into this 
discussion.

>> I don't understand how you can claim that it takes up vertical 
>> space when it's alongside the post. The only case where it 
>> would waste vertical space is when the post is a few lines 
>> long.
>
> I meant there is a empty vertical rectangle, it steals a 
> rectangular surface. Doing so steals both vertical and 
> horizontal space.

This layout is used by nearly all web forum software. It was 
chosen to be familiar to people used to those forums.

How would you design the layout?

> I have just seen you are right. But I think the text lines of 
> the messages are too much short. The end result is that less 
> than half the page is used by something that's not content. My 
> HTML design sense tells me this is not good.

This is a limitation of the format used to transmit mail and NNTP 
messages over the Internet (not all clients create messages with 
reflow information). However, text using shorter lines is known 
to be more readable, as you're less likely to lose track of which 
line you are reading.