boakes.org

This site has switched over to a new look and feel this afternoon, so I hope that you, the reader, find it comfortable to use. I’ll be interested to know if it works, ’cause if it’s all broken for you, I’ll switch back to the old theme and tinker with it a little more. Folks interested in the technical reasons that provoked this change, read on.

The main reason for the switch is that I was unhappy that the existing theme’s size was fixed by it’s border; this meant that although the text could be made bigger, the area that the text inhabited was always confined to a set width.

Where the width of a paragraph is constrained by the number of pixels there are several situations in which readability can be compromised:

• firstly, for anyone who uses very large text, the sentences can become difficult to follow as the number of words per line decreases.
• Secondly, when viewing the site on a monitor that has very high resolution the text is pitifully small. On an Apple 30″ Cinema display, the maximum space the paeg can take up is less that one third of what’s available. If the reader want’s to make it wider, they can’t.
• Finally, an increasing number of people are reading this site using Thunderbird and other RSS readers, the new format can more effectively fit within the window area available in such programs.

What I’ve tried to achieve is a theme that can scale appropriately in all circumstances. To do this I’ve specifically avoided using any absolute dimensions, everything is relative to everyting else, so the page is layed out relative to the size of the visible window, and all of the content is presented relative to the preferred font size that’s specified in the reader’s web browser - so if the preferred font size is 10pt, that’s the size the paragraphs will be.