I was looking at the thread about upcoming changes and admiring how the left column had navigation, and thought to myself, now that's a good use of real estate. Right after that thought, I quickly realized that on my laptop, running Windows 11, and in all browsers, the forum window aspect ratio or width appears to be fixed. By comparison, viewing the forum on my iPad or iPhone, both in landscape and portrait orientations, the forum window expands to fit the aspect ratio or window of the browser. On my laptop, those areas are just columns of gray.
That got me nerding out, looking at some other forums to see how that's handled. Half seem to have the blank areas, while others use that area, but it doesn't appear to be active/populated on many. They have slightly different behaviors as well, like how ES home page has the forums on the wide left column, and some information/navigation in the right narrower column, but the right column doesn't scroll unless you scroll the left column all the way down. Those types of things seem to just be how they've been set up, but I noticed that how the margins are handled goes both ways on different forums. I don't know if that's forum software or webpage design, but the behavior is different. If you resize the browser window to be narrower, the behavior of the blank columns vary, and for ES doesn't affect the forum window until you've resized it to be narrower than the active space, and for the home page, the forum column resizes narrower while the navigation remains fixed, up to a point.
I think I answered my own question, that on a Windows PC, the normal behavior is to have a fixed width forum window, while on IOS and perhaps other platforms, the aspect ratio sizes to the window and screen orientation. Is this correct, or is there some browser setting ?
PS. Looking at my post above, made me think maybe this column width stuff has more to it than real estate. I don't think I could get through some of those wall of text posts with no punctuations or other breaks, if they were full screen, without losing track of what line I'm on, so maybe narrower is better lol.
That got me nerding out, looking at some other forums to see how that's handled. Half seem to have the blank areas, while others use that area, but it doesn't appear to be active/populated on many. They have slightly different behaviors as well, like how ES home page has the forums on the wide left column, and some information/navigation in the right narrower column, but the right column doesn't scroll unless you scroll the left column all the way down. Those types of things seem to just be how they've been set up, but I noticed that how the margins are handled goes both ways on different forums. I don't know if that's forum software or webpage design, but the behavior is different. If you resize the browser window to be narrower, the behavior of the blank columns vary, and for ES doesn't affect the forum window until you've resized it to be narrower than the active space, and for the home page, the forum column resizes narrower while the navigation remains fixed, up to a point.
I think I answered my own question, that on a Windows PC, the normal behavior is to have a fixed width forum window, while on IOS and perhaps other platforms, the aspect ratio sizes to the window and screen orientation. Is this correct, or is there some browser setting ?
PS. Looking at my post above, made me think maybe this column width stuff has more to it than real estate. I don't think I could get through some of those wall of text posts with no punctuations or other breaks, if they were full screen, without losing track of what line I'm on, so maybe narrower is better lol.
