Branimir wrote:
As Bob already mentioned, users already can control column width - by resizing their browser window. Doing it that way has advantage that people actually know it's possible even if they are new to
the site. ..Also, IMHO, anything you try to do with fixed table widths, character
sizes etc. is more likely to reduce than to increase usability and accessibility.
Yes, and that is why we don't use fixed (locked) font widths... I like the default 0 size font which the user can
adjust with the browser text size (smaller / larger)
I dislike having to resize my browser for specific sites
and even more so now with Netscape's TAB feature which I now
use extensively rather than having multiple windows open
for different web sites.
Vadim wrote:
One counter-argument.... Seeing a bigger chunk of the text at the time helps them to read and scan it faster more than having optimal line width.
I don't buy this argument! Optimal line width is important onscreen or in print. I do NOT believe you
can read/scan faster with long lines.
If it's left uncontrolled, one can always resize his browser window and read at the width one prefers, and this is indeed default behaviour of the Web.
Again, I don't want to resize my browser window! The default behavior should be the ability (In netscape) to
hit the Ctrl+ or Ctrl- to adjust font size. I hate sites
the look "beautiful" but have locked the fonts and on a big
screen are almost unreadable to me!
Auto guess of format won't work in all cases, as Ben said. Let's leave it implicit. To say in another words, these two improvements you propose would probably be "too smart" features. I agree with your other two points.
Ok, I agree that on THIS technical forum, Auto Guess of
format won't work for some technical posts. But for newbee users on sites designed with OpenACS, I think doing the "auto guess" is valuable. In our experience, people who
use HTML tags often forget to switch to HTML and while it
renders ok online, the alert emails have HTML tags strewn
in the text.
How about a third DEFAULT choice in the Format dropdown
called "Auto" or "Normal"... Now we've solved this for all users.
Oh, I was gonna post this in a <table... to demonstrate my better readability point, but get this error message:
For security reasons we only accept the submission of HTML containing the following tags:
B I P A LI OL UL EM BR TT STRONG BLOCKQUOTE CODE PRE FIRST_NAMES LAST_NAME EMAIL GROUP_NAME
You have a <table> tag in there.
How Do TABLE or FONT tags make submissions insecure?
Heck, now I can't make any text RED with a font tag like
I can with the old bboard!
THANK YOU all!
-Bob
