[wp-hackers] Re: The fixed with of the admin area

[Jeremy Clarke]

I have to say that as long as small screen sizes are well-served,
accommodating huge screen widths isn't something that in my mind
trumps the usability improvements for most people of having a
reasonable width for writing in. I would speculate that many people
can benefit from slimmer content fields without knowing about it, so
even if they CAN resize their window, they just won't think to do so.
Thus I think working a humane width into the design by default is a
good idea (I personally use CSS stylesheets to change the full-size
display of images in Safari and stuff like that, but of the normal
users I've spoken to, most don't even think of things like bumping up
font sizes when it's too small to read, so expecting them to
investigate their browser looking for preferences that will modify
field widths is probably unrealistic).

That said, I am also in deep hate with the left-alignment of the whole
page content, it's kind of insane to me. You say that most blogs have
a fixed width content well, well they are usually also center-aligned,
having things on the left always feels like 1997 to me.

Here's a screenshot with the whole thing centered and the top-right
menus accounted for. I think it solves 90% of the aesthetic concerns
expressed above, and anyone who really needs a huge-width content
field can easily use a plugin or 2 lines in admin.css to get what they
want.

http://simianuprising.com/images/wp-25-whitespace-centered.jpg

jeremy clarke
http://simianuprising.com



On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 5:04 AM, Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel at mamane.lu> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 04:23:50AM -0800, Viper007Bond wrote:
>
>  > Just updated my SVN install and noticed that now everything is a
>  > fixed width (designed for a 1024 pixel screen).
>
>  > Words cannot emphasize how much I am against this.
>
>  Yes, that is one of my pet issues, too. I strongly think that if
>  people think that without the fixed width, it is too wide, then it is
>  their browser's bug that it shows it too wide. If the CSS/HTML does
>  not give a width, then the browser should pick a good one, depending
>  on user's preferences.
>
>  --
>  Lionel
>
>
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