Re: lilypond ./ChangeLog Documentation/bibliography...

[Heikki Junes]

Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

> Heikki Johannes Junes wrote:
>
> > Modified files:
> >     .              : ChangeLog     Documentation/bibliography: 
> > index.html.in html-long.bst     stepmake/bin   : text2html.py 
> >     buildscripts   : mutopia-index.py
> > Log message:
> >     optimize width for 800x600, width=760px (continued).
> Hello,
>
> can you fix/revert this?

Actually, it was a fix. As an introduction, I wanted to find a reference 
which would describe the subject:

  http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesign/a/aa080904.htm

A brief extract:

  "If the scan length of a line of text is longer than 10-12 words or 
shorter than 4-5 words, it can be very difficult to read. This means 
that readers with large or small browser windows will have trouble."

>   All of a sudden the lily docs in Firefox start to look like 
> attached.   My screen is 1280x1024, and I want things to look OK on my 
> 1600x1200 mac as well. 

> Let us assume that our users  know what they are doing, and respect 
> their settings for browser resolution.
>
> Likewise for lilypond.org .  Can you explain your changes?

Let me continue from the point mentioned in the above extract. Take,
for example, page:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.7/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Example-templates.html#Example-templates

There will appear 25 words per line on average in a 1280x1024 flat 
screen, and even more in a 1600x1200 screen. Let me describe an analog 
situation considering newspapers.

Think that you would get in the morning a newspaper whose lines would 
span the total width of the paper. How would you feel like reading it? 
My experience with a 1600x1200 screen has been that it is tiring to read 
a very long line -- and in the end of the line you jump to the next 
line, which may easily be a wrong one.

I cannot do better that the great newspapers, which have stuck to 800px 
width:

 LeMonde: http://www.lemonde.fr/
 BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
 TIME: http://www.time.com/time/

In addition, they have several paragraphs.

Sometimes, you seed a good mixture of a full width and 800 px width:

 YLE (like BBC of Finland): http://www.yle.fi/

Even music scores has "paragraphs" -- just take away all the bar lines 
and you will recognize the effect of long lines.

What is the direction in which you would like to fix/revert? Currently, 
the logical structure of the web pages have been described, but the 
readability of the pages is not quaranteed.

- Heikki