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.