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Old 13th October 2009
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Carpetsmoker Carpetsmoker is offline
Real Name: Martin
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Join Date: Apr 2008
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I would really like to see the old forum style -- I'm currently on a 17'' monitor and everything is soo small, and on my other monitor which is 20'' - even smaller
The (maximum) width should be based on character size, right now it's 60em (elements), the width of an em is roughly the width of a capital M (Interestingly, this has been the point of some discussion though).

This is how it ``should'' be done, the reason a very wide page doesn't work very well is because the eyes need to move from left-to-right a lot, which is pretty tiring -- It's long been considered good typography to arrange text in relatively small columns. Open any random newspaper or magazine and you will see the text is put in small columns, and not written across the entire page, for exactly tjhis reason.

A few years back I was editor-in-chief for a local boy scout magazine -- I once tried putting the text across the entire page ... It was not at all a success and a rather interesting lesson in typography

This is also why I set the max-width property, unlike some other pages (i.e. FreeBSD forums) which just set width to something fixed like 75% or 800px -- This layout should also work well with large fonts or small screens ...

This typography ``guideline'' or ``rule'' which has been around for more than 100 years, has been mostly ignored on the web ... Just like most other typographic guidelines & rules.

Many people are used to these over-wide not particularly well typeset webpages, IMO if you take the time to get used to this you will probably like it better ...

Anyway ... This one will probably stay the default, but as I've said before, I will make multiple styles and let people choose between them ...
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