[Python-Dev] Playing with a new theme for the docs

[PJ Eby]

On Mar 21, 2012 12:00 PM, "Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote:
>
> On Mar 21, 2012 5:44 AM, "Ned Batchelder" <ned at nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
> > The best thing to do is to set a max-width in ems, say 50em. This
leaves the text at a reasonable width, but adapts naturally for people with
larger fonts.
>
> Please, no, not even this "improved" version of coddling. If you're
> formatting e.g. a newspaper or a book, by all means (though I still
> think the user should be given ultimate control -- and I don't mean
> editing the CSS using the browser's development tools :-). But when
> reading docs there are all sorts of reasons why I might want to
> stretch the window to maximum width and nothing's more frustrating
> than a website that forces clipping, folding or a horizontal scroll
> bar even when I make the window wide enough.

Well, the only thing that's more frustrating than that is having to resize
my window to make the text readable, and then *still* having to scroll
horizontally for the wide bits, or have to alternate sizes of the window.

Just because flowing text paragraphs are set to a moderate max-width, that
doesn't mean that code samples, tables, etc. all have to be the *same*
max-width, or have any max-width at all.  That is, keeping flowing text
readable is not incompatible with having arbitrarily-wide code, tables, etc.

(Text width is an ergonomic consideration as much as font size and color:
too wide in absolute characters, and the eye has to hunt up and down to
find where to start reading the next line.)
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