Re: Keyholes vs. Missing Features

Scott Meyers wrote:
> At 01:51 PM 10/13/2003, White Wolf wrote:
>> necessarily a gratiutous (I copied that word) one.  Internet Explorer
>> showing maximum 11 elements in a dropdown is a gratiutous keyhole -
>> since the designer has picked an arbitrary number, instead of
>> providing dynamic size with reasonable effort.
>
> It's certainly a keyhole.  To determine whether it is gratuitous,
> we'd have to figure out how hard it would be to dynamically size the
> visible portion of the list.

If you are the author of the software, it is very easy.  From the
outside...  I have tried it.  It is anything but easy.  It is doable,
but complex.

>> Another note: As I am going deeper into HTML/content rendering I
>> start to see that (unfortunately) since HTML does not support
>> columns (like newspapers have) it rather seems a non-gratiutous
>> keyhole when people present fixed width web pages.
>
> No.  Eliminating fixed-width pages is trivial (as I described in my
> draft chapter) and eliminates the keyhole.  That may lead to
> readability problems, but a readability problem is not the same as a
> keyhole.

Certainly. ;-)  But going from one problem to the other isn't good.  I
have some sites with textual info, and well, then comes the other
"keyhole"(*): browsers have 6 font settings, font tiny to huge and even
huge is too small...

(*) well, borderline.

>> IMO what we have "found" here is a need to add columns to the
>> HTML/XHTML/CSS standards.
>
> I don't see that the "need" for such a thing has been established.
> At any rate, such a feature would address the "page too wide to be
> easily readable by people who for whatever reason don't make their
> window narrower" problem, not the keyhole problem.

Nope, it isn't.  It is another problem, that is right.  But if I have to
resize my window to that "fixed width" we have the same keyhole back!  I
have a big screen, and if I want to be able to read the text(**) I need
to resize it to a certain width.  While the text could be layed out in
columns, and be easy to read.  And that part (today) is not
gratitutitotito I- I cannot spell that thing.

(**) easily I mean.  I was really concetrating on that lately.  For over
a year, since you have sent me that original article for review, before
Boston.  And I have to tell it *is* hard to read when you have over 80
characters per line.  At least for me.

White Wolf