New EEVblog Website Install

[EEVblog]

No one seems to complain about fixed width wordpress blog sites though, but that's kinda par for the course.

So what? Two wrongs don't make a right!

I agree. I don't like it either, I think it's unworkable, I'll get them to change it back.
I do think that Wordpress themes (including mine) work well on a fixed width. Forums don't though.

[PA0PBZ]

I agree. I don't like it either, I think it's unworkable, I'll get them to change it back.

Thank you!   

[Muttley Snickers]

I agree. I don't like it either, I think it's unworkable, I'll get them to change it back.

Thank you!   

Thank You Very Much......

[ElectroIrradiator]

I agree. I don't like it either, I think it's unworkable, I'll get them to change it back.
I do think that Wordpress themes (including mine) work well on a fixed width. Forums don't though.

 

[c4757p]

And if it goes horribly wrong, we know who to blame!
http://www.inerds.com.au/

Well, it says they are "Sydney's best website designers". I don't know ... they couldn't even get the whole picture of that lady to fit on the front page - they cut off the picture right at her nose! 

Oh my god, their website is awful! It's like a parody of modern, flashy, over-designed websites. It is to 2015 what this website is to the 90s...

I have to commend them for one thing - this JavaScript crapfest actually works properly in a non-JavaScript browser. Impressive! Though the noscript text is condescending:

This is a modern website which will require Javascript to work. Please turn it on!

[mamalala]

I'm wondering why web-developers even try to impose a specific, fixed layout onto a website. After all, one of the main points of HTML is that the users browser displays the page in a usable fashion. HTML is not a page layout format. All it should ever do is give hints about where to place what content. Never, ever, should it use fixed pixel-widths and the like. If people want a pixel-exact layout for their content, they should do a proper layout and get that printed on paper.

Oh boy, how i hate all these sites that think a page must have the content only in a narrow strip at the center, leaving huge blank spaces left & right.

Greetings,

Chris

[tggzzz]

No one seems to complain about fixed width wordpress blog sites though, but that's kinda par for the course.

So what? Two wrongs don't make a right!

I agree. I don't like it either, I think it's unworkable, I'll get them to change it back.
I do think that Wordpress themes (including mine) work well on a fixed width. Forums don't though.

Thank you.

If only all companies listened like that to their customers, and were prepared to reverse mistakes as quickly.

(I couldn't possibly be thinking of Microsoft and RS and ..., oh no)

[Len]

No one seems to complain about fixed width wordpress blog sites though, but that's kinda par for the course.

I do, but since I'm just muttering at the screen no-one pays any attention.

[Towger]

I'm wondering why web-developers even try to impose a specific, fixed layout onto a website.

Laziness.  It is easer for them.

[apelly]

Nobody likes change.

Do whatever you like.

But...

This website is best viewed with Internet Explorer 6.0 at 800x600

Sound familiar?

The whole fucking point of HTML is that it looks fine however you look at it.

The structure of a forum page especially lends itself to client side formatting.

[Zero999]

All of a sudden the forum is no longer being stretched across the screen and appears squashed, making it more difficult to read than before.

I'm using Firefox 39 on Windows 7 and have a 1920x1080 monitor.

[fmaimon]

Same here. Tested with Firefox 39 and Chrome 44

[tom66]

If this is a deliberate change, it looks bad. Could be an error with the skin, after an update perhaps? Check if the main content has a "width" property assigned.

[electr_peter]

I have also noticed that page is a bit narrower. Blue side panels are too big.

[drws]

Have you seen : https://www.eevblog.com/forum/news/new-eevblog-website-install/msg725965/#msg725965 ?

[Vgkid]

Works fine for me on IE10/ Firefox-39.03 . Though I'm running windows Vista

[rs20]

Works fine for me on IE10/ Firefox-39.03 . Though I'm running windows Vista

Are you running on a non-HD screen perchance? The "problem" is that the content of the page is capped to 1045px rather than 95% of page width; if your windows are approx 1000px wide, then of course it's going to look about the same to you.

[c4757p]

Forum is irritatingly small for me too. Hopefully Dave doesn't let these god-awful web "designers" he found come play in the forum as well as wrecking his front page...

[Zero999]

Have you seen : https://www.eevblog.com/forum/news/new-eevblog-website-install/msg725965/#msg725965 ?

Nope, hence this thread.

This is rubbish. I hope he changes it back soon.

[T3sl4co1l]

Eh?

Oh, right, some people actually read the web with a maximized browser...   In wide screen (or worse), no less.

Studies have shown, the most pleasing and easy to read paragraphs are about 60 characters across.  Which is about where 800x600 left off, given typical dot pitch and font scalings.

Between sidebars, margins and images, I personally don't find it practical to browse below 1000 width, but, I use little more, to achieve a manageable experience.

Treat yourself, and try viewing webpages in a narrower browser.  You'll get more on screen (you can just about tile two windows side-by-side on a 1080p monitor), and have an easier time reading it.

4:3 monitors are better for this, because you get more vertical reading room (at 1600x1200, you can comfortably fit a single column sheet at full screen).  1080p just isn't quite enough to do that.

"Aha!", you might say, and turn the monitor sideways -- most LCDs are intended to operate that way as well; but alas, the width is then far too narrow, even for A4 size documents (which are quite narrow to begin with), plus if it's not a high quality monitor, the color banding along the now-horizontal axis is severely exaggerated, so that it is even more critical to be seated exactly in the center of your screen for best viewing.

(That said, portrait screens can be quite useful for certain limited applications.  Heavy text editing, programming and such, is one such example.)

(For all three of these reasons -- the bad landscape ratio, the bad portrait ratio, and the bad color rendering and contrast -- I despise HD monitors.  Yes, others can be had, but not for as cheap.  To this day, one of the best displays remains a Trinitron CRT, in the 21" and 2048 x 1536 x 85Hz range, which still sell for $200 easy.)

So, yes -- there is indeed some intended method to viewing media.  It's not [just ] snobbery, it's ergonomic science!

Returning to websites;

Conversely, there are viewers which might not even be able to see 1000 pixels wide.  Back in the day, it used to be the users stuck with 640x480 and 800x600 screens, but nowadays, reduced resolutions have returned, and in vastly greater diversity -- and numbers!  Indeed, Google reduces the PageRank of websites that don't support mobile[citation needed].  Sure, you can make a mobile version, but... if you can't afford a web development team to spin that... you better get it right the first time.

Finally, there's always been, and always will be, the fundamental concern of accessibility.  Some viewers will have really strange resolutions (multiple monitors, oddball screens, mainframes, TVs...??!), scale factors, user style sheets and so forth, which all interact with the original document.  Obviously you can't much control what a user style sheet will do, but you can at least make it easier by allowing DIVs and TABLEs and such to resize automatically.  Fixed width is, and always has been, the bane of web design: the lowest, simplest, dumbest solution to making something look right, for one narrow set of platforms and viewers.

Please Dave, you can do better!

Tim

[rs20]

Hmm, change aversion aside, am I the only person who saw some plus points to the fixed-width layout? Sure you can label the web designers as lazy, but forum posters will be lazy no matter what you label them. And forum posters with 30" screens will post 1300-px wide diagrams in their posts, which are a pain for people on sensible sized monitors (or indeed, people like me who have large monitors but don't read forums in a fullscreen browser ).

Now to be fair, I think it probably should be changed back purely because the average poster here is probably reasonably thoughtful, and although the fixed width layout makes a lot of sense theoretically, exactly how you pick that 1045 (or whatever it was) px width is a tricky job, and the optimal value will drift over time. It should be a maximum size if anything, not just a fixed width that makes the page just overflow on windows smaller than 1045px.

Also, isn't text sprawled along thousands of pixels is harder to read? I suppose when the screen is so wide that every paragraph becomes a single line... I just found hero999's images funny because if you force yourself to be objective for a moment, they both have the same amount of dead, empty whitespace:




The only difference is whether the useless whitespace is inside our outside the page, and whether the paragraph looks like a nice paragraph, or one and a half tenuously stretched out lines ? If you look at a typical EEVBlog thread, the messages are so short and the headers/title etc so tall that the vertical size of a post is almost independent of the width of the page... so why are we so bothered about page width again? 

But, bottom line is, user should get to choose, so it's good that this change is being reversed. I'm just baffled that people are posting screenshots like the one above as if to say, "look how bad the new layout looks", when it looks vastly superior (more pleasing to the eye, less eye movement required, and easier to read) to me? 

[Vgkid]

Works fine for me on IE10/ Firefox-39.03 . Though I'm running windows Vista

Are you running on a non-HD screen perchance? The "problem" is that the content of the page is capped to 1045px rather than 95% of page width; if your windows are approx 1000px wide, then of course it's going to look about the same to you.

Currently on my personal laptop, so yes.

[EEVblog]

Also, isn't text sprawled along thousands of pixels is harder to read?

Yes, there are a ton of studies on optimum reading width / charcters per line, and the smaller the width the better. That's why newspapers have columns, and why Wordpress blogs have fixed widths.

I suppose when the screen is so wide that every paragraph becomes a single line... I just found hero999's images funny because if you force yourself to be objective for a moment, they both have the same amount of dead, empty whitespace:

Correct. On a properly formatted page for readability the text would wrap around the image.

But, bottom line is, user should get to choose, so it's good that this change is being reversed. I'm just baffled that people are posting screenshots like the one above as if to say, "look how bad the new layout looks", when it looks vastly superior (more pleasing to the eye, less eye movement required, and easier to read) to me? 

You'll always find pros and cons both ways.

[fmaimon]

If you want the old forum back, just use this greasemonkey script:

Code: [Select]

// ==UserScript==
// @name        EEVBlog width changer
// @namespace   eevblog.rlz
// @include     *.eevblog.com/forum/*
// @version     1
// @grant       none
// ==/UserScript==
function addGlobalStyle(css) {
    var head, style;
    head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    if (!head) { return; }
    style = document.createElement('style');
    style.type = 'text/css';
    style.innerHTML = css;
    head.appendChild(style);
}

addGlobalStyle('div#wrapper    { max-width: 100%; }')

[Zero999]

Eh?

Oh, right, some people actually read the web with a maximized browser...   In wide screen (or worse), no less.

Studies have shown, the most pleasing and easy to read paragraphs are about 60 characters across.  Which is about where 800x600 left off, given typical dot pitch and font scalings.

I don't care. I preferred it when the forum stretched across the full width of the window and find it much more difficult to read now.

It's personal preference. Under the old forum setting, if you'd rather it be displayed as a narrow column of text then you could resize the browser window but now you have no choice.