[TYPO3-typo3org] FW: TYPO3.org nice but 800px?

[Ben O'Hear]

Hi folks,

Micheal, you make two very valid points:

- The fonts should be resizable (at least for the main text - that might not
be practical for the nav), which is what we specified but somehow got lost
en route to deployment (Daniel, any ideas?).

- If the fonts are resizable then the word count of each line will diminish
as the fonts get larger.

[For those of you who are wondering, the generally accepted optimal line
width is 10-15 words. Any more and you struggle to find the beginning of the
next sentence (and in really extreme cases it apparently strains your neck
and eye muscles). Any less and you have too many 'carriage returns']

> Would you be interested in help?

With that in mind I would be *really* interested in seeing a CSS that
resizes the whole layout with the font size for IE and Mozilla, keeping it
in proportion. Basically the same effect as zooming in Opera. Do that, and I
promise to send you an autographed photo of my six month old son.

I'm still not convinced about the flexible (but I hasten to add that I am
convincible :-). So far the strongest argument is that certain content items
are too wide. I want to wait till the dust settles a bit before we look into
that.

The other argument is that the user has the option to trade off legibility
for less scrolling. I'm not sure this is really a usability gain, especially
as most users won't have a clue about what an optimal line width is (and
even if they do, is it really polite to ask them to fiddle their browser
window until they hit it?).

So far I am staring at an uncertain usability gain and a definite aesthetic
loss, combined with an inconsistency between Typo3.com and Typo3.org. So
altogether I remain in favour of fixed.

But hey! I'm up for anything.

So, CSS jockeys, the two challenges are served:

- A layout that "zooms" when the font size changes.

- A flexible layout that does not end up with a line width the length of my
arm on my 20'', that does not have white space scattered all over the
content, that shows good gains in scrolling and of course, that looks great.
An idea would be to restrict the general text column to a reasonable size
and allow "multi-column" (i.e. tables) content to flow.

Best,

Ben