In reply to Skald (msg # 220):
Think you'll need to mock something up for me. (c;
horus:
Is the wasted space that SunRuanEr was speaking of a function of the layout being adjusted to fit a majority of screen formats? What I was suggesting was an extension of the custom theme idea, where a user could configure and store more than one.
Drag the side of your browser window narrower. At 800 pixels in width you'll notice the menus collapse, that should be around tablet width and possibly phones in landscape mode. At 695 pixels you'll notice left-right columns collapse so they're top-bottom instead, that should be mobiles and smaller tablets in portrait mode.
There's also much smaller adjustments as the screen shrinks as many of the calculations are percentage based.
SunRuanEr:
Jase says that's fixable in custom themes, so I believe him, but I'll be 100% honest (and feel stupid) when I say that I cannot even BEGIN to figure out how to fix that in custom themes, so maybe we need a more intuitive way to adjust that when the responsive site goes live?
Preferences > Create Custom Theme. Scroll to "maximum page width (1,000 to 2,000):", edit to whatever you want. Hit "Create!". That'll create a custom theme based on your currently selected theme but with your own width setting.
My monitor is 3,440 pixels wide so if anyone knows about space on the sides it's me. I cannot run my browsers full-screen anymore because if a website doesn't have a maximum text length it's absolutely horrible to read. I know there's a limit, if I run full screen I've actually got to track the line I'm reading all the way back to the start and then jump down a line, if it's a usable width then I can just snap down a line and to the left edge.
Anyhoo, I've increased the maximum screen width from 1200 pixels to 1400. That results in a content (message) width increase of somewhere around 21% from 675 pixels to 817. That increases the characters per line from around 100 to 125 (don't ask me why it's not a 21% increase, possibly just the sample text I used).
As a result I had to increase the line height (the vertical gap between each line) as it was getting a difficult to read without it.
The left column is probably now a little too wide as it's a percentage so I'll look at reducing that.
Not sold on it, I think the content is a bit too stretched out now. Even this post screen seems weird. Longer posts seem to be better but short ones look silly.
FYI we've gone way outside the recommendations. Recommendations are a maximum of 75 characters per line, 85 at a push. The other part of the recommendation is that the longer the line gets the larger the line height. With our width line height should be about 2.0, we've got it at 1.7. Read a bit more of the thread and you'll see I've got on ad nauseam about it.
I think maybe if I reduce the left column width a bit we should look at about 800 pixels for the message content, so a little bit less than what we've got now.