CSS abuse

[Simon Huggins]

Hi bogofilter,

On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 09:51:34PM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote:
> I don't understand.  How does keeping the text a constant width
> increase readability?  

It's not a constant width, it's relative to the size of the font used
and it's only a maximum so if you resize your window smaller than that
it'll be ignored.

Otherwise on really wide browsers you'd end up with paragraphs being one
line.

> With a fixed width I can only see the left hand side of the column of
> text unless I resize the window to some predetermined size decided
> upon by the style.  

I don't get this as when I resize I see the text just reformatted.
(except the table and the <pre>s which is what I'd expect)

Can you send pngs or some such of what you actually see?

> This is totally contrary to reason for HTML in the first place.  The
> Browser, NOT the style, is responsible for deciding how to display the
> page content.  The HTML is only supposed describe the nature of how
> each element is presented.  The browser adjusts that to the local
> environment.  

And you're free to override the style with a !important ... :-p

But seriously given the limit isn't really a limit but a "hmm, if you're
wider than 36em in the current font then please limit the width to
that" suggestion it's not all that evil.

It's not like saying the width must be 172px because that happened to
look right on the author's screen in 10pt Times or whatever.

> Ignoring the size of the user's window is not anything that increases
> readability.  Its breaking how browsers are designed to be used.

But it doesn't impose anything different?!  If the limit is wider than
the window it's effectively ignored  (unless your browser is doing weird
things).

From
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/properties/page_layout.html#max-width
	This property specifies allows you to specify a maximum width
	for an element. When the width of an element is calculated,
	should it be greater than this property, max-width specifies the
	width of the element.

Doesn't seem all that evil.

Please send pngs so I can understand what you're talking about.

Simon.

-- 
[ "And on that day, Lister, Satan will be skating to work."            ]