Re: Problem with CSS Horizontal Dropdown Menu

Hi Dorayme,

On Thu, 01 May 2008 15:02:50 +1000, dorayme
<doraymeRidThis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <v7pg14hjrifp7hk8fu18t0mp4a1vbp411c@xxxxxxx>,
Jim <FakeAddress@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have to take issue with your statements. ... The
browser window is the picture frame and your content is the picture.
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.


Hello Jim! First, I was not necessarily talking the whole website. I
was particularly meaning the design within the "frame". A naive
aesthetic thinks everything looks nice when centred, including lists and
headings and particularly so, body text.


Now that would be ugly. Personally the only text that I find
acceptable to center (individual lines that is) is short quotations.


I agree, it often looks satisfying to have the main frame of the site
centred. But I cannot agree it is less than perfectly satisfactory when
some sites are not so centered.


Fair enough. As they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.


The analogy you use has left me flabbergasted, there is no reason at all
to so compare a website which can be delivered to many different
monitors and platforms to the pics on my wall (which are, yes, centred
horizontally but not quite vertically). That you do, suggests to me that
you have indeed a simpler idea of aesthetics than my own incredibly
sophisticated taste - excuse me while I adjust my French painter's hat,
twirl my moustache and sip some of my fine French cognac...


Chortles and Nyuks. You can just call me an Occam's Razor sort of
guy.




Alternatively you could make your "picture" extend from one side of
the frame to the other. So, why don't newspapers or magazines or books
exhibit this feature? Because it is bad for readability. 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. Since we are confining our content to a narrower space, it
makes all the sense in the world to center that space within its
container.


This is a red herring.

Not at all.

It has nothing at all to do with centering.

Sure it does. The text resides within a container (lets say an HTML
table for sake of argument) that resides within a larger container
(the browser window) and that table is the only content that appears
in the window. Do I want to allow my table to stretch horizontally to
fill all available space? With today's wide screens, the answer is no.
I want to limit how wide the line is going to be because very
long/wide lines are less readable - this is a lesson learned from
print publishing hence the newspaper/magazine analogy.

I just grabbed a magazine off the top of my "to read" stack
(DMReview). All the articles are broken down into 2-3 columns of
text. Draw a box around the columns and you will see that the text
area is centered on the page with respect to the surrounding white
space.

You
perhaps do not know that you can limit the width of text (to make it
more readable) without having it go the whole way across the main frame
of a website.

Sigh. Obviously I'm aware that I can limit the width of the text
because that is the underpinning of this entire debate: where to place
a content area that is not as wide as the containing screen within the
bounds of that screen. I go with centering. You appear to be arguing
otherwise.


Because you perhaps are unaware of this, you are trying
for the reader (and I applaud you for this) by limiting the width of the
whole show.


This whole argument is about where to position text/content that is
limited in width with respect to its container. Equally obviously I
have stated that said text area/content area should be centered
within the browser window vs hugging either side of the window which
results in large areas of dead white space on the other side.

My guess is we have different design philosophies so let's just leave
it at that.





Best Regards, Jim
http://artsnova.com/blog
.

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