[Pdx-pm] learn.perl.org rework (TPF grant)

[Erik Hollensbe]

On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 09:49 -0700, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
> # from Shlomi Fish
> # on Monday 04 May 2009 03:51:
> 
> >1. When I open the page in a wide browser window (about 90% of my 1280
> > pixels screen), I get a huge empty margin between the right-hand edge
> > of the page, to the browser window.
> 
> What if you make your browser narrower?  Maybe it should have some 
> dancing bunnies in whatever space is leftover?
> 
> I'm still thinking about the content layout, but I would rather that it 
> looks reasonable at 100 pixels wide than have it require 1024+ to 
> render -- and still limit the text columns to a reasonable line length.  
> Getting CSS to do this right always boggles me.  I think the semantic 
> structure is adequately tagged, so it can probably be done with CSS if 
> someone wants to try that.

This is why a lot of pages are centered and use a percentage instead of
a fixed width:

body {
  width: 80%;
  margin-left: auto;
  margin-right: auto;
}

This way the box model determines the width of the content for you, and
wraps text, etc appropriately.

The "web developer" firefox plugin can also be helpful for testing this
kind of stuff as it can resize the browser to commonly used sizes:
http://chrispederick.com.

-Erik