Websites and scaling

[muse108dc]

Wasnt quite sure where to put this but this sort of made sense to me.

I've been using a widescreen monitor for a long time now and I know I'm not the only one. So then why is the internet terrible. I pulled up twitter on my 1080p laptop display and twitter litterally filled less than a third of the screen. And twitter is not the only one. The Verge, as modern as websites come fills up half, the homepage of HardwareCanucks is the same, I could continue to list them off but it would be easy to name the ones that do scale properly. Admittedly the forums scale perfectly here. But why, why in this day and age do so few websites actually acknowledge that we live in a widescreen world.

All website developement seems completely focused on mobile, on tablets or phones but for those of us who still use laptops and desktops the internet experience is going downhill. I have this beautiful screen and so little of it is being used.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by muse108dc

Wasnt quite sure where to put this but this sort of made sense to me.

I've been using a widescreen monitor for a long time now and I know I'm not the only one. So then why is the internet terrible. I pulled up twitter on my 1080p laptop display and twitter litterally filled less than a third of the screen. And twitter is not the only one. The Verge, as modern as websites come fills up half, the homepage of HardwareCanucks is the same, I could continue to list them off but it would be easy to name the ones that do scale properly. Admittedly the forums scale perfectly here. But why, why in this day and age do so few websites actually acknowledge that we live in a widescreen world.

All website developement seems completely focused on mobile, on tablets or phones but for those of us who still use laptops and desktops the internet experience is going downhill. I have this beautiful screen and so little of it is being used.

Its useless to make a website larger than 1280x1024 realistically and anything larger becomes EXTREMELY difficult to code for as the wide you make it the more white space there is and the uglier it looks.

[NyteOwl]

it's easy enough to make a site flexible to fit the screen size, but realistically few people with large/high resolution monitors use their browser full screen. Long lines of text are also harder and more tiring to read as they move they eye to extremes of travel to follow the line of text. As a result most sites code for a maximum width of between 1024 and 1280. With the easier reading/scanning of text and the average browser widow size in use this only makes sense.

That said I'm currently redoing my own site and it will scale with the browser window in usable width from 320px to at least 1920px (This monitor doesn't go any higher and I haven't tried it on the CRT yet.). With THAT said, it does/will look its best at about 1200px wide.

[JD]

Yeah, like you said, it's mainly for text layout purposes I'd say. It's much easier to format text/paragraphs under the assumption it will always be a fixed width and will display the same for everyone.

The forums itself here though are flexible (percentage based) which means they expand with your browser window. Although yes it does "fit" the screen, reading text is rather annoying I find. It means something that should be a few lines long ends up being a single line stretching across my 2560px. Eye fatigue becomes quite an issue for me

Usually I end up keeping my browser window to half the screen when I'm actively reading. Then it's more natural feeling.

It really depends on the site and content. Obviously Twitter has no reason to be any wider because the messages are limited to 150 characters? There's no reason to make it stretch out.