New Mercurial Website

[Andrew Lentvorski]

Steve Losh wrote:

> This is probably the thing I dislike *most* about the wiki design.  I 
> keep my browser window at roughly 1000 pixels wide so sites with 
> multiple columns (brightkite, twitter, newyorktimes, etc) are usable and 
> look good.
> 
> When I go to the Mercurial wiki I have to read lines of text 1000 pixels 
> long which is not fun at all.  There's a reason newspapers use very 
> narrow columns instead of having their lines span half or all of the 
> page -- it's easier for the humans to read shorter lines of text because 
> with long lines your eye has to jump farther after each line.

Um, you do know that you can reflow multiple column layouts.  Right?
See: http://python.org , for example.

I am less concerned about the behavior when the monitor is large than I 
am when the monitor is small.

> A common rule of thumb is to aim for "1.5 alphabets" of characters per 
> line, so somewhere around 40 or so.  Full lines on the wiki with my 
> window size clock in at about 150+.  Sure, I could decrease the width of 
> my web browser, but then if I switch to another tab that contains a site 
> with multiple columns I get horizontal scrollbars.

Rule of thumb?  From who?  Based on what research?  None of my books on 
my bookshelf follow that rule.  Manuscript guidelines don't follow that 
rule.  Magazines are all over on both sides of that rule.  And, in fact, 
the newspapers only hold to that rule on their front page.  If you look 
at deeper articles, they happily throw that out.

If you're really interested in readability/navigability, then we should 
be using something like Amazon as the example as they do tons of 
navigation research.  Navigation bar on left.  Reflowable middle column. 
  Non-essential far right column.  Upper-left header conveys important 
state information.

And, by the way, newspapers didn't use narrow columns because they were 
easier to read (they actually slow fast readers down).  They used narrow 
columns because they were easier to reorganize suddenly when you had to 
make last minute changes on old printing press technology.

-a