Newspaper columns are not all of uniform size. Layout editors choose one width from within a certain readable range of column widths. Different stories may be of different widths, but a particular story will keep to the same width, as different widths would look strange. Of course if a story jumps to another page, it can have a different width.
On the web the same principle applies that columns of text which are too narrow (when pinched by photos etc) or too wide (single column on a wide screen with browser at full width) then its probably going to make readers unhappy. -S On Jan 28, 2013 4:27 PM, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 9:23 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Trouble there is that newspapers are portrait and have pages, but screens are usually landscape and (the important bit) stretch indefinitely vertically. A good example of the problem with doing it like a newspaper is https://sites.google.com/site/sophieinnorthkorea/
- brilliant article, but on a laptop screen the layout is just really
confusing.
And newspaper layouts are handcrafted for exactly one width and height. It's hard enough to get articles to display nicely with embedded images and infoboxes with a single column - could that really work multi column? Maybe a better use of the extra horizontal space would be to expand some of the embedded images and infoboxes out of the text?
I was going to point to theglobalmail.org as an interesting example of a multi-column layout on the web (horizontal scrolling!) but it looks like they've caved in and gone to a conventional one column vertical layout.
Steve
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