Multi-column layout generator

http://www.pagecolumn.com/

Via Digg comes this excellent article on the upcoming specs for CSS3. Using the new column parameters, it will now be much easier to to create 2, 3 and even 4 column sites.
You can check out the article here. In the meanwhile, check out Yahoos…

A web page that can fit a whole paragraph onto a single line is darned difficult to read. I end up highlighting line after line so I can keep track of where I am in the text as I read.

Yes, multiple columns are GOOD. For some of us that do have post 1960s monitors and video cards, we run higher than 640×480 resolution and it’s danged annoyin to see holier-than-thou people spouting off about designing for 800×600 and “make them scroll” to read.

Flexible design doesn’t mean make a web page that can expand to any width like a 5 gallon bag of water popped on a floor and spreading 75 feet in every direction. Extremes aren’t useful in either direction.

Don’t waste 75% of my browser window with emptiness. Columns are good. Employ them. Make your presentation as good for me as it is for your ever so popular 800×600 user. Eventually they are going to get a modern computer like me, where are you going to be then?

So stop being a turd and being negative about people who do big resolutions. Old UNIX users used to gripe about people writing emails with greater than 40 chars in width… Is this the modern version of lame criticizing reborn?

Have a nice day

I do concept and copy for leading advertising agencies and one major insight is this: readers don’t like reading online. Online reading often involves reading tiresome line-lengths and scrolling, which sucks.
It was, indeed, over a year ago that Cédric Savarese wrote this fantastic CSS-3-adaptation. I already use it on my website, not to show off intricate technology but to make text more readable, which is obviously the case if you brake it down to lines running short in multiple columns.
Multi-column-layouts are an excellent solution to make online reading a much more relaxed experience, chucking out small bits of text one at a time.
Check it out here:
http://zemynt.de/artikel.php?artikel=a_new_ecology

The reason columns happened in newspapers were because when reading, people don’t like to scan more than a few degrees of eye movement.

Newspapers have way more “on-screen” real estate than most monitors, and the column thing was to allow you to read down the page, without scanning
left to right than was comfortable.

Even XGA can accomodate 2-columns plus decoration well, and still provide continuity.

Please, for blogs and news articles, give me a sideways scrolling multi-column format.

Also, columns (and books) allow you to scan the next column (page) and last column (page) to allow quick looks forward or back into the text. This permits the reader to quickly review tricky content, or prepare theirself for the upcoming material. It’s not something most people are particularly concsious of doing, but they do.

Retention is much better when read from a book or a multi-column text, than it is from single column (single sided print or web-based) media.

Now that we are starting to get nice monitors, we are back at that problem. I don’t want to have to sweep my eyes 75 degreees to read each line, I’d rather have 5 columns of 8 point text, at about 10 degrees each.

Agreed. 1600×1200 now has a 1% adoption according to these statistics: http://www.utexas.edu/teamweb/reports/screen_resolution/index.php?log=Dec2005.log

Bad and biased source? Probably. But then u’d better cite a better source.

Are you mad, stupid or ignorant?

Don’t you know that, as text lines become longer, the copy becomes much harder to read (a max of 2x alphabet lengths of the general rule of thumb).

Do you really think that print typesetters for the last centuries have been layouting out pages in a columnar format simply for the fun of it? They could spread the copy across the whole width of a page if they wanted. Why do you think they dont? They realised long ago that readability is important, and splitting copy into multiple columns is the answer.

Some smart ass is prolly going to answer “make a single, width restricted column”, so let’s head that one off; With the high resolutions we now enjoy, doing this will leave you with acres of dead space – unless you wanna fill more than half of the page with ads, which seems to be becoming the norm.

The other salient point is a little something called “above the fold”. Scrolling sucks. Don’t take my word for it, just see the evidence from your web logs that show links and content below the fold – off the bottom of the browser window – doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of click thru/readership as that in the reader’s plain sight.

With screen widths of 1900 now fairly common, and 1600 even more so, I say let’s use that width effectively and adopt the tried and tested column format in the name of readibility and visibility.

And there’s nothing wrong with a bit of healthy ‘competition’

Now we can only hope that there will be a way for us to impliment this on previous IE versions.

It has the added advantage of using the syntax from the proposed CSS3 spec, so that when there is actual support for it in browsers, the same effect can be achieved by just removing the script and without markup changes in the document.

More discussion here:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/css3multicolumn/

If anything the types of columns we as designers use are not the same as what is for the offering here. We dont want the ability to columnize our text blocks (this does have limited use). We want a more global industry adoption of standards so that current browsers (*cough*IE 7*cough*) support css like “display:table” and “display:table-cell” better.

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS3_Columns

http://www.johnwiseman.ca/blogging/

Columns were created for newspapers because they have limited page space. The web has *unlimited* page space and no one is going to be terribly happy with scrolling all the way up to the top of the screen to find the next column.

Unless you fit all the columns on one page, this’ll be another overused and damnably annoying “feature” just like blink.