a little madness

Every time that I have upgraded my monitor, I have marvelled at how much more screen realestate is available. Each time I have gone through a period of adjustment where I adjusted the layouts of my applications to take maximum advantage of the extra space. My latest move from a 19inch to one of the nice Dell 24inch screens has allowed me to move to a three column layout in IDEA with the project view on the left, the structure on the right, and still plenty of room for 120 char lines in the editor. Awesome. Moving on to Thunderbird has yielded a similarly pleasing outcome with its nice three column vertical layout. Nice. Even JEdit supports a configurable layout that allows me to make good use of the screen.

Unfortunately my amusement came to an end when I opened up my browser. Either one, it matters not. Where ever I go, whether it’s my favourite news or community website, any one of the blogs I try to keep up with, I end up with one of two things. Either a fixed width page with half my screen empty on either side (but all of the content nicely squeezed into the middle), or a 100% width page where the lines are so wide that they become difficult to read and large patches of whitespace spread around the page.

Now I understand that large screens are only just becoming affordable, and so I do not expect websites to suddenly rearrange their content to suit me and my dislike of unused pixels. It does however bring to attention one aspect of building web applications that can be very frustrating. The page layout. Now certainly some people are doing nice things with the tools that are available, namely css, but that can only go so far. What I would really like to see now is a good old fashioned trustworthy layout manager.

Only just last week I was trying to achieve a relatively simple task. Opening a popup window that is an appropriate size for the content it will display. Well, I had hoped that it would be a relatively simple task. After loading the content into an iframe, doing my best to work out what its visible width and height would be and then dropping it into a popup, I am still no closer to a solution that works in both Firefox and IE. With a slightly better API for handling page layouts, this type of task would become dead simple. Speaking of layout managers, those guys over at qooxdoo are doing some pretty interesting things. Now, if only it didn’t look so much like windows.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Opinion, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.