Re: Problem with CSS Horizontal Dropdown Menu

Jim wrote:
On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:10:34 +1000, dorayme
<doraymeRidThis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rather than being old fashioned, I think it is just a naive aesthetic and for this reason: it is the one simple design principle anyone can come up with no matter how inexperienced, 'make things nice and symmetrical".

Symmetry of *this* kind is obvious and generally easy to do. So it tends to be something inexperienced people do (children do this a lot) - what else can they do, given their experience and desire to make it 'nicely laid out'.

I have to take issue with your statements. For example, how many
framed pictures do you have hanging on your walls at home? Okay, now
in how many of those frames do you have the picture off-center?
Frankly I have never seen anyone frame a picture off-center.

I have - particularly when the picture is part of a framed collage. Collages rarely have symmetry about the vertical axis (and if they do, they tend to look forced and artificial).

And most web pages are collages: they contain multiple heterogeneous visual elements.

> The
browser window is the picture frame and your content is the picture.

I don't believe that's how users typically perceive web pages. (Indeed, for a presentation at an academic conference in the fall, my coauthor and I will be displaying some screenshots of web pages that we've blurred, flipped about the vertical axis, and otherwise distorted, precisely to encourage users to look at them as wholes rather than visually traversing the various parts.)

You can think of the white space on either side as being the matting. To my eye, web sites that hug the left border of the "frame" with lots
of dead white space to the right look terrible.

You probably want *some* margin, rather than putting content right against window decoration, but I think asymmetric layouts with reasonable whitespace often look as or more appealing than centered ones.

So to make a
web page more readable you don't want a line of text that extends from
one side of the screen to the other: you confine it to a narrower
space.

Do you believe the user is incapable of setting a comfortable column width? *My* browser rarely occupies the whole screen - generally only when I want to view a page that some nitwit designer has made too wide.


--
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Crown design poll, we need YOUR opinion.
    ... I do that a lot on this forum for some reason. ... I am glad it got you to reveal the frame though. ... guarantee you that by the time you run a second weld over a previous ... metalworking industry that a material is "aircraft grade", ...
    (rec.sport.unicycling)
  • Re: Lightspeed exceeded
    ... The choice of Galilean transforms between inertial reference ... >>>frame does not do that for the laws of electrodynamics. ... And to some extent, THAT DOESN'T MATTER. ... but I see no reason to hail him as a genius if he 'got lucky'. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: 2006 Honda Shadow 600 (VT600C) Question
    ... a)If the brake pedal rubs against the frame when it isn't supposed to, it could in the end eventually cause me to have to replace the frame. ... The reason is that the post involved would be hard to weld and would require some specialized fabrication ... the actual 30 years of experience (just as a working engineer; ... somehow suffice when it came to having a little credibility in speaking on ...
    (rec.motorcycles)
  • Re: The High Holies Tackled a Child and Threw Her To The Ground Because She Disturbed Their "Peace"
    ... The "distorted frame" I'm referencing is none other than our intrepid ... Hausfrau threw a smoke bomb on the ground that started a little clump ... That only leave the greybeard high holies as the perpetrators of the ... The reason this thread was created by b is to get a fight started. ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
  • Re: "Relativity and Reasonableness Tests"
    ... And what does Minkowski give for a reason why C is a constant? ... closing speed with objects moving in the aether frame is not C. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)