I've always hated web applications, to the point that I'll refuse to edit a wiki and various other things which basically make me completely disfunctional in this age of web 1.999999.
It just occurred to me that maybe the problem is the margins. I'm currently typing this in a 400x200 pixel box within a 1000x600 pixel window, which means that almost my entire screen is currently margin, vs when I use a desktop app and my 800x600 window has at least 780x550 usable area. I'm also looking at two scrollbars right now. This might explain why I don't blog so often.
But I had this realization while reading a web page, where again my view of the world is almost completely overwhelmed by margins! (And then there's the pdf, where the margins just serve as a painful reminder about how the margins cannot be written in.)
You will all now please write "I will not fill the world with useless margins" longhand in your margins until they are full. I suppose that means writing it on paper, scanning it, and uploading it (no image tiling allowed -- that's like using the thing with the 5 chalks.)
Human vision has a physical limit to how many characters you can scan without moving your eyes horizontally as well as vertically; this is why printed materials tend to have the same number of characters per line across all types of printed material.
As an experiment, test how long it takes to read a work at 80 columns, 160 columns, and 320 columns. Then test how tired your eyes feel after each one.
Tiny little textboxes are silly, however.
apparently 50, err 45, err 7%, err 80px
Eric Wilhelm on 2008-10-14T05:40:40
I would say use.perl was not a good example because of the fact that it doesn't validate on its claimed dtd, but that probably has nothing to do with the underlying problem, which is that neither I nor my computer (which happens to know a lot about my preferences, screen size, etc) gets to decide anything about how a web page is displayed.
And while it is true that columns of text should be wrapped at about 80 chars, this is not the problem I'm having with margins. Often, the margin is 100px or more on the left for the sake of some widget which only exists at the top of the page (take any mediawiki page for example), which means that either the column is much narrower, or I have to scroll right, or make the window wider. And further, making the window wider often makes the text column wider than desirable. So the margin is more often hindering optimal display of the text rather than serving it.
Then there's the pdf, which is formatted for a printed page (a quality of roughly 300+ dpi) and doesn't read well on screen until zoomed to about 200%, most of which is margin (which would be "ok" if it coincided with "fit page width" because that's a convenient view option - but it rarely does. (This annoys me to the point that I think `pdftotext | less` is probably a better option most of the time.))
And what these things have in common is that they have hard-coded the presentation into the data (in a way which is completely unsuitable for their primary use case.) Ironically, the desktop app is likely going to spend most of its code on the presentation, but it tends to gracefully resize, and actually delivers a usable experience for its target use-case.
Re:apparently 50, err 45, err 7%, err 80px
Aristotle on 2008-10-19T21:34:08
neither I nor my computer gets to decide anything about how a web page is displayed
http://userstyles.org//http://userscripts.org/. Take back the web.
