hacks.mozilla.org blog archive navigator and screen width

[Colby Russell]

Some feedback about the "rollingarchives" div on hacks.mozilla.org:
I find the whole thing annoying, but if you must, please reduce the size
of this div. It's currently three times the necessary line height,
cutting off space I'd rather dedicate to actual content. If you want to
be /really/ helpful, throw those into friendly, machine-readable link
elements. Also, those anchors don't degrade gracefully, breaking one of
our flagship features of years past, tabbed browsing, not to mention our
ideals of portable, reasonable web authoring. The effect could just as
easily be accomplished without breaking anything.

I'm kind of ambivalent about the 800 px width requirement; on one hand,
it's not the ridiculous 1024 px or more that many other websites
require (some of them Mozilla websites, even!), it doesn't personally
affect my current browsing habits, and screen resolutions with a width
of 800 pixels seem to be a nice minimum requirement to expect from most
desktop users of the past decade, but what about mobile devices and
ultraportables? What about those with widescreens using operating
systems whose UI conventions don't dictate running most applications
maximized (e.g., Windows)? It'd be nice if I could actually /use/ the
extra dimension afforded by newer widescreen displays by tiling browser
windows side-by-side without having to run at resolutions with 1600 px
of horizontal width.

A request of 640 px isn't entirely unreasonable considering, you know,
reading efficiency actually drops as you continue to expand page size
past the magical 70 columns or so, and it would allow us to pick up
iPhone users as well.

--
Colby Russell

[Christopher Blizzard]

Hey, Colby! Thanks for the feedback on the site. I think the
rollingarchives comes from the original theme that we based the hacks
site on - K2, but I'm not sure. As for the width, it's not clear to
me that getting smaller would be any better. It's already a pretty
simple two-column layout and honestly the biggest feedback we've
gotten from authors is that 500px wide (the size for content) isn't
enough and they want more like 700px. So I think we're doing an OK
job there, even if it's not a super-compact page.

--Chris

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