FAQ CSS revised

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Greg Louis wrote:

>> > Back to the style sheet, I removed the "body" style which controlled the wings and left all the vertical whitespace and subheading specifications.
>> 
>> Horrible. Lines with more than 170 characters. Looks like a page made by someone who never read a book, seen a newspaper, heard about typesetting, knew the word layout etc.  Why don't we after all use unbounded line length in e-mail?  The argument about width of a console was never valid anyway, since every reader can easily wrap to the available width.
> 
> There speaks a guy who can't even be bothered to wrap his own emails as
> recommended in RFCs 2821 and 2822 ;)

Just demonstrating the disadvantage. By the same argument,
unlimited lines should be good.

> The important thing here is that the choice should not be yours to make
> for anyone but yourself. 

You suggest to remove just any style from any web page. Does
not really sound realistic, but if you want, you can easily
disable styles in your browser.

> I thought the narrow lines looked annoyingly
> stupid (I think the same of the format the Registrar uses); why should
> you force them on me? 

Why force people to change the window width to make the text
readable? This sounds like "This page is optimized (and only
works with) IE, download it _here_, further make sure your
screen resolution eaquels 1024*768 and you maximize your
browser" to me. I want to read pages whithout modifying
anything in my browser.

> We're not forcing wide lines on you; you can
> narrow them for yourself, as Matthias pointed out,

Was that the suggestion with user style sheets? If so, it is
simply not working. You cannot do it by user style sheets,
since this would work on any page, no matter if it has just
one text column (as in our layout) or any other layout. On
the ohter hand, you can disable CSS on your brower or just
disable width by overwriting it in user style sheets.

> and enjoy your
> perceived improvement in legibility accordingly.  (I agree with you in
> principle about short lines -- on paper. 

And the same rule holds her. The eye has to catch lines,
huge jumps make it hard, also to follow a line becomes
harder. Thats why http://edition.cnn.com/ or
http://news.yahoo.com/ (just to give prominent examples) do
restrict the width.

pi