 |
 |
Hey all, Having recently discovered Code4Lib Journal, I was fooling around with columns as ways of making articles more interesting to read, perhaps eventually on tablet devices: [image: AltPresentation.jpg] Works best in (and in fact only tested on) Google Chrome on an iMac, but you can try it out for yourself at http://lsta.me/code4lib/ ... all I've done is mirrored the journal site and added some styles to the bottom of the WordPress theme's CSS file. In theory you could apply such styles via a web browser extension or user stylesheet to the website itself, live. But I wouldn't recommend it without further testing and tweaks. My main goal was to see if columns improved the reading experience on an iPad, and the answer is definitely a "yes," because while I set the columns too small, you still get a sense of where you are overall and can see farther ahead with columns than when you zoom in on a single column webpage. The trouble with automatic columns, however, are defining when the automatic columns should break. So far, it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth in CSS, but with any luck that might change 10 years from now. It's funny how tablets in particular break our notions of page -- on tablets, we want essentially resizable and reflowing text columns but with fixed and pretty "page" layouts that we can navigate through. Consider magazines on the iPad -- sometimes we want the pretty text and images, but other times we want just text alone, or just images alone. And yet that means coming up with natural ways to zoom in on text and images without making the text unreadable or images blurry. It should be possible, but as far as I know, no one's done it right, yet. Either it's a Kindle-style text experience, or a magazine-style Image experience. I wonder who will mix the two together, first? Inkling almost gets it right with textbook content, but often feels like it's wasting space with its one-column infinite scroll approach. Which brings me back to my original point, I think columns and grids are crucial for helping people see more info at once. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I was thinking about turning the Journal into an iPad/tablet app, given its Creative Commons license, but I now suspect given my interest in columns, that I'd be laying it out in InDesign first, like a real magazine, which might be too much work. Louis.