[Geany-devel] Build System User Guide

Lex Trotman elextr at xxxxx
Sun May 22 13:49:06 UTC 2011


Hi Randy,


> I'm curious as to what you mean by unconstrained width, and what you see
> in your browser(s).
>
> Let me tell you what I see in my browsers:
>
> Iceweasel (Firefox/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-1) on Debian 5.0):  The behavior
> here is reasonably nice.  The actual text of a document wraps to the
> width of the window (this is good, afaic).

Text wrapping at the window width is what I mean by unconstrained, it
is up to the browser how long lines are.  In Firefox 3.6.17 same
behavior.

But this is *not* good for users.

Document width for text contents should be limited, it should not
straggle right across the page (see W3C WCAG 2.0 1.4.8 for
recommendations, <80 characters and links to information on the
physiology of reading long lines http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG)

No, this time its not just me being a cranky opinionated so-and-so :-)

> Konqueror (Konqueror 3.5.9 (on kde 3.5.10)  on Debian 5.0):  The
> behavior here is not as nice.  The colored bars at the top and bottom
> of the page are of a fixed width (which probably varies based on the
> font and font size used??).  On my main screen, the bars are about half
> the witdth of the screen.  The text wraps to the width of those bars
> and does not adjust based on the width of the window.

Not sure what page you are looking at, if its the Geany wiki then it
sounds broken, AFAICT there are no instructions to limit the width in
the HTML.


> (Just as an aside, I should point out that this is better than some web
> pages where I can't even scroll horizontally to read a complete line
> (maybe when the page is in the form of a table with columns and the
> text is in one of those columns).  The best I can do then is copy and
> paste the text to a plain text editor (or, usually, open it in Firefox)
> to read the entire text.)

Those websites are just plain broken!!!

>
> Anyway, so to me, the text is not unconstrained (by which I would mean
> long lines of text that don't wrap under any circumstance).

Wrong meaning, sorry, I mean not constrained by the HTML, specifically
the max-width attribute set to <= about 40em.

Cheers
Lex



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