Timeline for TeX new site theme is live
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
28 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 23, 2018 at 4:43 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | @cfr Well at the widest setting it's no narrower than before (AFAIK), and no one complained earlier, so... relatively speaking. | |
| Aug 23, 2018 at 3:00 | comment | added | cfr | @ShreevatsaR But whether it is perfectly fine depends on the resolution. Do you mean perfectly fine on a 'Retina' display or perfectly find on a 96 DPI setup or both? | |
| Aug 18, 2018 at 16:16 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR |
@JoeFriend There's been some confusion: the feedback here is not about full window size, where as you say, things are indeed fine. The feedback is specifically about the minimum possible width of the main content area, at certain window sizes. Specifically, if I visit tex.stackexchange.com in an incognito window, then the main div (<div id="mainbar">) has width 726px (or 728px) in a full-size window, which is perfectly fine! But as you start making the window narrower, its width reaches a minimum of 443 px, which is unreasonably narrow. The complaint is about the 443, not the 726.
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| Aug 18, 2018 at 1:16 | comment | added | cfr | How many characters that means is not something you get to determine. It depends on DPI, font size etc. etc. Are you assuming a standard DPI? If so, reality doesn't fit. And I don't even have an especially high DPI screen (not quad or retina or whatever it is). I regularly scale windows up or down or use weird font sizes to adjust for the many applications which use different assumptions. E.g. GTK applications need large font sizes to be even marginally readable (and I still scale Firefox up). QT applications (e.g. my TeX editor) need tiny font sizes. It's a mess, but can't be assumed away. | |
| Aug 18, 2018 at 1:10 | comment | added | cfr | @JoeFriend When you talk about the number of pixels for the central column, I think that's part of the problem you have understanding what people are saying. Here are some specs: ` dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (277x156 millimeters) resolution: 176x176 dots per inch`. This means that the maximum width of the central column is 107mm. (But usually it will be significantly less.) How many characters per line do you think it reasonable to fit in 107mm? When you talk about 75 characters per line, I don't know what you mean: you have a set number of pixels. ... | |
| Aug 16, 2018 at 11:40 | comment | added | David Carlisle |
@JoeFriend note my comments were not aimed at you personally but just using your Id to @ ping "the company", so I think it only fair if I link here to Shog9's helpful response in the linked chat site But the fact remains that the default three column layout is not usable and people will either be forced to use user scripts to over-ride it, or some will leave the site, both of which are unfortunate.
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| Aug 14, 2018 at 20:33 | comment | added | Ulrike Fischer | @JoeFriend Well I can't stand this width. Which means that I will either scale it with css or shrink the window so that the right bar collapse. Both gives a much better usability. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 18:01 | comment | added | David Carlisle | @JoeFriend apart from any technical issues, this rollout has been a public relations disaster for the company. Yes you need to sell advertising space, but there used to be a conceit that the network was about building communities and communities offering self help. But the communities feel (and have been) ignored insulted and belittled in this whole process. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 17:18 | comment | added | Joe Friend | @DavidCarlisle Understood. Thanks for your persistence in articulating your viewpoint. Please do know that we're listening. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 17:08 | comment | added | David Carlisle | @Joefriend li do realise that the company needs income but if you can't scale them you need to drop them or move them before the main content becomes unusable. You manage on mobile so a normal desktop window should not be a problem. Otherwise our most viewed meta answer is going to be telling people how to scale the right bar. If you do it you retain control which to be honest is better for everyone than lots of incompatible customisations floating around | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 17:00 | comment | added | Joe Friend | @DavidCarlisle Actually we can't scale down ads. We have to use industry standard ad sizes and can't change them or scale them. We do relocate the ad when the right side bar is dropped (this is most notable on Stack Overflow). However, it is unclear how that impacts ad performance since most people don't currently see that view. If we see that ad performance is not significantly impacted, then we could be more aggressive in hiding the right side bar and maintaining the main content column width. This is something we will continue evaluating. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 16:56 | comment | added | David Carlisle | @JoeFriend my perception is coloured by the fact that the initial image I showed is a typical view for me. Feel free to ignore the full with comment if it is really true that even with both sidebars it is unchanged. I have removed the left and restyled the right in my personal setup as otherwise the site was too painful to use. Even with image ads in the right bar you could scale them or at narrow sizes drop them as you do on mobile | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 15:42 | comment | added | Joe Friend | @UlrikeFischer Our right side bar is fixed in width due to the need to support specific ad sizes. This is less of an issue for some sites where we have no/limited ads. But it is critical for us to keep the company running. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 15:41 | comment | added | Joe Friend | @DavidCarlisle I'm not sure how you're evaluating the width of the center content area, but question lists are 735 pixels wide at full window size with the left nav compared with 728 on the old design. For a question page the main content has only changed 2 pixels at max window size. With the left nav hidden it is in the same ballpark. So, I'm honestly not sure how to evaluate your feedback since it seems to contradict the facts as I understand them. Now, maybe I'm missing some context. Posting pictures in an answer that show what you're describing may help. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 10:14 | comment | added | Ulrike Fischer | @JoeFriend I'm using the site (with the left bar enabled) in full size on a wide monitor and the large right side bar simply looks unbalanced and odd. I have reduced it with some css to 20%. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 9:48 | comment | added | David Carlisle | @JoeFriend sorry that really is not an acceptable response. Even at full screen the central content is too narrow and preserving the sidebars at the cost of distorting the posted content is frankly an insult to those of us who have freely given thousands of hours of our time to supporting this network. Please see our site mod Joseph's summary just posted. You should back this change out now and come back with a usable design when you have one. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 0:26 | comment | added | cfr | If you switch off the CSS altogether, the width is great and, actually, the site is rather more usable in many ways with no CSS. It is pretty ugly, but the dominant green boxes even disappear. Unfortunately, stuff seems to get randomly superimposed on the content at the far left of the window, which is obviously a disadvantage. Still, it is as viable an option as any other, I'd say, at least for browsing the lists of questions. (Haven't tried viewing a question that way, so that might not work as well.) | |
| Aug 13, 2018 at 18:35 | comment | added | Joe Friend | @DavidCarlisle Thanks for the feedback. Responsiveness is a work in progress. The vast majority of users currently use the sites in view ports as large or larger than our max size. Even with the left nav pinned, the max size increase is not a problem for these users. With the left nav unpinned the max size is the same as before the change. Of course, for the percentage of folks who use a smaller window are impacted (some for the good, some not). This is a balancing act and is a work in progress. Hiding the left nav and right side bar more aggressively is something we are looking into. | |
| Aug 13, 2018 at 18:28 | history | edited | Joe Friend | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 28 characters in body
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| Aug 12, 2018 at 20:36 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | @JonEricson Actually, as your comment started with “I agree the middle column in the first screenshot is uncomfortably narrow”, then shouldn't that be fixed? The fact that things are better at narrower or wider window widths doesn't change the fact that things need to be fixed for this width too. (The fix would be simple too; it's just a matter of increasing the minimum width at which the right bar appears… so the only reason for leaving it this way is that you indeed think it's better to have the right bar at this width, but you yourself said you don't think that. So it's puzzling.) | |
| Aug 12, 2018 at 7:41 | comment | added | Joseph Wright Mod | Indeed, as @DavidCarlisle says the main content has to be the priority. Notably, on the mobile version of the site, it's only the main content that gets served, with no sidebars at all! | |
| Aug 10, 2018 at 20:45 | comment | added | David Carlisle | @JonEricson really the site is unusable with medium width windows (across the whole network) you need to back this out until you come up with behaviours that preserves the main content width and shrinks or drops the sidebars as required. The code block styling and ugly boxes can be improved again over time, but you need to make the site usable first. | |
| Aug 10, 2018 at 20:30 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | @JonEricson On every site across the Stack Exchange network this complaint is brought up. Even sites notorious for narrow columns like (say) medium.com, have at least 75 characters for their text as you make window narrower, while here on TeX.SE we see fewer than 60 characters. Try it yourself: starting with a wide window, make it narrower until the right-bar disappears, then slightly wider so that it appears again: you'll see something like i.sstatic.net/Jc29t.png or i.sstatic.net/CNxD6.png or i.sstatic.net/0eTAh.png — too narrow columns for the main text. | |
| Aug 10, 2018 at 14:49 | comment | added | cfr | @JonEricson I'm not going to constantly adjust window widths for SE. I have multiple tabs open always with different sites. I expect sites to adjust to the window width available, because I can't set the width separately for each tab, even if I had the time to do it. I'm using a laptop screen and I have a small laptop. Space is at a premium and at least 50% of the space in your tabs is empty. 'It looks fine if you fiddle to get exactly the right pixel dimensions each time you visit the site' is, frankly, laughably weak. The only thing I want to do when I visit TeX SE now is stop looking at it. | |
| Aug 10, 2018 at 3:03 | history | edited | Milo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Added a .gif to illustrate the problem
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| Aug 9, 2018 at 23:58 | comment | added | David Carlisle | @JonEricson you can make the window different sizes, but it's your css and it's making the columns that size in that window. Given that nearly all posts in the centre have code or an image it is simply too narrow even at full screen. If you drag the window wider and narrower it's clearly visible that the sidebar widths are preserved until the last minute (when as you say it does drop the right bar) but the central content is distorted, this is just prioritizing things in completely the wrong order, you should fix an optimum width for the main content and preserve that as far as possible | |
| Aug 9, 2018 at 23:46 | comment | added | Jon Ericson | I agree the middle column in the first screenshot is uncomfortably narrow. But if I make my browser window a bit smaller the right bar disappears and I get ~110 characters. If I expand the window to match the second screenshot, I get ~110 characters again. I've read 50-75 is ideal for readers, so the middle column seems a bit big. Of course that rule of thumb might not hold when the page has some code or an image. Maybe it would help to show something other than the question lists to illustrate your concern? | |
| Aug 9, 2018 at 23:26 | history | answered | David Carlisle | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
