[Sigia-l] width limits for a body of text

[John McCrory]

Sounds like there's a holy war going on, here. Was Peter Berndt's original
query really a question of either a) leaving everything up to the user to
decide vs. b) determining what line length is best for the "user" and
forcing it on her? 

Think about the driver's seat in your car. Most now come with lots of levers
and wheels that allow you to adjust the seat to suit your preferences. But
don't let that fool you. Lots of driver seats, particularly in more
affordable cars, are not really all that comfy and aren't paragons of
ergonomic design. As a driver I think it's great I can adjust my seat, but
I'm not an engineer and I don't know anything about ergonomics; it would
have been nice if those highly-paid engineers at the car company had used
their specialized expertise and provided a seat that was both ergonomically
safe, comfortable AND adjustable.

So, perhaps what interface designers should consider is using their
specialized expertise to create designs that are generally pleasing to the
eye, easy to scan and read, yet also adjustable by the users browser
settings or other preferences. The default appearance ought to be good
enough and not punishing, and maybe even delightful, like I personally find
the International Herald Tribune -- http://www.iht.com/ -- which is also
adjustable. The great thing is, the default design, which blends their
thoughtful design with my browser settings, is so good that I don't have to
adjust anything. It doesn't "make me think," it just lets me read and
explore.

I'm fighting this battle in my organization: I feel that the type on our
site (which is a fixed size) is too small, and the lines on lots of pages
are too long to read comfortably. But the people who reviewed the site's
design DIDN'T read it, they just looked at it and appreciated its visual
beauty. These font size and line length decisions were made by outside
designers, who for the most part did a wonderful job on everything else
about the site. So far, I've let it go, because it isn't the most important
thing in the world. But I am addressing it in our current project to make
the site 508 compliant, and so we're trying out various liquid approaches.

Sheesh, if there's this much controversy surrounding a question about line
lengths, is it any wonder that many techies -- who simply want an answer of
how to code their HTML and CSS, and would prefer to have that answer quickly
-- don't want to listen to people like us with our usability religion?

   John McCrory
   Webmaster 
   Vera Institute of Justice
   http://www.vera.org/
   http://www.johnmccrory.com/