[IxDA Discuss] Usability of Multicolumn text

[Susan Farrell]

At 11:31 AM -0700 7/24/06, mark Schraad wrote:
>
>I am very biased here... but, the Lawrence Journal World 
>(www.ljworld.com) is not only my local paper but owned by some good 
>friends of mine.

This is an impressive effort. I like that they did two things most 
online newspapers never do, but should:

* The front page says where the paper is from (city and state - 
country would be nice too)

* The pictures in articles are clickable, the large version is big 
enough to see good detail, and you can buy a copy of the picture 
easily.

I don't like their belt-and-suspenders method of linking both the 
headlines of article blurbs and providing a "read story" link for the 
hypertext challenged. I don't think this is a good accessibility 
tradeoff, because a section page has tons of links that share the 
same link text but go to different places.

Michael Micheletti expressed my opinion about the IHT site. It 
started out being inaccessible (blank pages!) on Mac OS when it went 
to 3 columns, so I stopped reading it. Then it offered printer 
friendly pages, which I could use, then they redesigned and probably 
browsers improved, making their 3-column layout almost work most of 
the time (sometimes the bottom of the page does weird things in 
Safari still).

AFAIK, though, they are unique in having pages that reflow columns 
with window size. Anyone know specifically how this trick is 
accomplished? Anyone know of other sites that do reflowing?

I saw an experimental browser at SGI that did this column reflowing 
trick in 1995 by using special style sheets and code, but I haven't 
seen any implementations of it besides IHT yet. I'm thinking it must 
be hard to do. Too bad browsers don't support that feature by 
default. It would solve so many problems.

Re. the Apple link: I wish gray text on white backgrounds would die.

Susan