[Python-Dev] Playing with a new theme for the docs (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Mon Mar 26 19:19:00 CEST 2012

On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:55:42 -0400, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au>wrote: > So, again, why make your browser window for reading text that large?

Because I have one browser window, and it's maximized. And I can do this, because most websites are designed in such a way that they have usable margins for text flows. Even PEPs and Python mailing list archives, for example, have sane text margins -- shall we go back and make those dependent on window width instead? [...] Designers' rules of thumb for text width are based on empirical observations of focal length, saccades, etc. If you have special needs visually, you're more likely to require the text read to you, than to have narrower text, and I at least am unable to conceive of a visual disability that would be helped by increasing the text width. In other words, there is a well-established majority need for how many characters should appear in an unwrapped line of text, based on majority physiology. Designers who limit it based on pixel size are Doing It Wrong; the max width should be based on em's rather than pixels. (Font sizes are a separate issue.)

I'm with Philip on this one. I hate web sites that have a fixed text width (so that you can't resize narrower and still read it), but I also prefer ones that set the max width to the "readable size" in number of character positions.

Like Philip, I have one window. My window manager (ratpoison) is more like 'screen' for X: you can split the window up, but it is much more useful to have only one window visible at a time, most of the time. So splitting the window in order to make the text narrow enough to read slows down my workflow. (Which means that on the python docs and the bug tracker I just put up with reading it wide...)

I realize that I'm in the minority, though :)

--David

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