Delta Tango Bravo

A few months ago a friend lent me a fantastic book called Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis. The author does a fantastic job of describing the intoxication of the game as he becomes more and more deeply involved in the competitive Scrabble world. The history of the game and the current debates over dictionaries are fascinating even to the amateur player. Highly recommended reading to anyone who plays Scrabble and it will actually change the way you play your rack. Anyhow, enough coffee-housing.¹

Also of interest to the Scrabble aficionado, there's a weblog called PuzzleBlog that has word and number games. A neat adaptation of the weblogging format. So, here's a challenge for you, what's the highest score you can get from the following rack?

¹ Speaking unnecessarily (i.e., social banter) during an organized Scrabble game. Coffee-housing is frowned on at organized Scrabble clubs and is against the rules at Scrabble tournaments. [definition from Tuscon Scrabble]

I discovered a great site via Coudal Partners that lists superheroes from around the world. Canadians can proudly lay claim to both Mr. Canoe Head (of Four on the Floor) and Benton Frasier (of Due South) as national superheroes along with more traditional selections like Captain Canuck.

My cohort Steven expressed his frustration with this a long time ago, but I thought it was worth reiterating. Why the heck does anyone turn off the automatic indenting on bullet lists? By default, a bullet list (also called an unordered list) on a website has nicely indented text like this:

• This is the first list item and when
  it wraps onto two lines, it indents nicely.
• This is the second list item and when
  it wraps onto two lines, it indents nicely too.

On the other hand, some designers, such as Jeffrey Zeldman, sometimes intentionally disable this using some simple styling and their lists look like:

• This is the first list item and when
  it wraps onto two lines, it doesn't indent.
• This is the second list item and when
  it wraps onto two lines, it doesn't indent either.

Now, I can maybe understand doing this if you're extremely limited by space and need to fit in as much content as possible, but I can't envision another purpose. As far as I can see, indented bullet lists are easier to scan visually, look more orderly, and are easier to make.

Matt Rainnie's recent comment about Dr. Seuss reminded me of a site I visited a few months ago. I hadn't realized that Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) had illustrated commercial advertising during his career. This gallery contains some neat examples from NBC to General Electric to Standard Oil. They seem particularly strange and interesting when one's experience with his art is soley from children's books. On a side note, my favourite read has always been The Butter Battle Book, a book clearly about the pointlessness of the Cold War nuclear arms race.

Compiling and debating top-five lists seems like an annoying habit that is easily transferable to a weblog so I may incorporate this as a somewhat regular feature. First up: "The Five Greatest Band Names of All Time". I base my incredibly subjective reasoning on overall impression and on the appropriateness of the band's name to their musical genre.

1. The Folk Implosion
2. The Velvet Underground
3. Sonic Youth
4. Crystal Method
5. The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Runner-up awards go to Propaghandi, Furious George, Veruca Salt, Black Sabbath, The New Pornographers, and Smashing Pumpkins. And then there are good bands despite their unfortunate names... Solely by their names, U2 and The Beatles had no business ever becoming great bands. A clear lesson that a name isn't everything.

Recently, someone was kindly complimenting the layout of this site and commented that, had it been his site, he would have gone with a fixed-width layout. For those of you who don't design websites for a living, a fixed-width site is one that doesn't stretch to fit your browser window. Usually designers set the width of the site somewhere in the ballpark of 770 pixels wide and it stays that way no matter how wide or narrow your window is. Many sites, including many of the biggies like Salon and CNET, have fixed-width sites.

So, why would a site like this one benefit from being fixed-width? I understand some of the benefits of a fixed-width site:

• The primary benefit I can see would be that I could control to some extent the line-length of the text in posts. Studies have concluded that a line-length of something like 10-12 words is ideal for readers and I could set the width of the left column of my site to approximate that.
• Designing with a fixed-width would be easier for creating graphics and managing new content. Because I'd know the exact width of the space where a graphic or a piece of content is going, I could make my graphics and text fit perfectly and make the images extend to the sides of a column like you would doing bleed stuff in print work.
• A fixed-width site never 'breaks' apart due to extreme stretching. With a flexible site, if you stretch your browser window ridiculously small, elements of the layout will jump around or overlap each other. Good new browsers, like Mozilla and Safari, allow you to set a minimum width, but your flexible site will 'break' in Internet Explorer. This never happens to a fixed-width site.

Almost all of the sites we develop at silverorange have flexible layouts.¹ With a flexible-width layout I have a number of distinct advantages:

• The site presents more content to people because a flexible-width site stretches to maximize screen real estate. If people stretch their browsers quite large, the content stretches to fit and more content is available on the screen at once.
• In term of readability, I can control the line-length to some extent using percentage widths. On this site, both the left and right columns are set with percentages, so that as the page gets wider, each one stretches a bit. Even at a large window size (my laptop stretches up to 1400 pixels wide) the line-length isn't unreadable. Maximized, I still only get about 16-20 words per line: longer than the ideal length, but not too significantly.
• A flexible width makes the site more readable for everyone. The layout of this site currently scales for people with their monitors set to a resolution of 640x480 without horizontal scrolling. I know most people are have monitors that are at least 800x600, but why not make the site more accessible people for those unfortunate souls? Also, many people, myself included, never maximize their browsers and browse just under 800x600 in a floating window.
• Flexible sites look better. I know this one is largely subjective, but a site like this fills the window nicely, has consistent margins around the content, and allows for nice large images if done correctly. As well, the 'breaking' issue is only really relevant when someone reduces their browser window to an extreme size and then, only in browsers that don't understand the min-width attribute.
• Although some may argue that it's easier to design for a fixed-width site over the long-term, with proper care, flexible-width sites can be properly up-kept even on a large scale. Sites such as Amazon.com use flexible-width sites to good effect even with incredible quantity and diversity of content.

So, tell me what am I missing here? Why would someone take this site and make it fixed-width? And, just to make it clear, I'm not at all complaining about the person's comment. I'm truly interested to hear your opinions on this.

¹ Notably, the Veterans Affairs Canada and Starmaker websites are both fixed-width. The first adheres to strict guidelines set out by the Government of Canada and the second has many fixed-width forms and thus made more sense to limit the width.

At the moment I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Boston. As I mentioned earlier, I haven't been in Boston since I was fairly young and today I'm realizing that I should come here more often. What a great city.

This morning I went to the Museum of Fine Art, which had a fantastic and diverse collection. It's kind of fun going to galleries with no real idea of what their permanent collections contain. The MFA contains a great collection of 17th Dutch genre painting, Copley's Watson and the Shark, Millet's The Sower, Turner's The Slave Ship, and many other fine works. This afternoon I'm off to the Institute of Contemporary Art to see the exhibit "Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art".

Update: The influence of cartoons exhibit at the ICA is totally worth checking out if you're in Boston. It's a really well curated exhibit with stuff from Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, and a number of currently working artists. One of the artists (I can't recall his name) was particularly interesting. Some guy from Chicago who no one had ever heard of, until he died and one of his friends went through his apartment and found a huge number of cartoon-like paintings and an epic illustrated book.

On Sunday, I'm heading down to New Hampshire with some of the other silveroranges to meet with a prospective client. We're considering stopping in Boston on the way back (yup, we're driving), a city I haven't visited since I was about fourteen. I'm soliciting advice. If you had one day to do with what you wished in Boston, what would you do? (and where would you eat?)

Dan James, our company's CEO, has been documenting his Outward Bound excursion on his weblog for the past few weeks. If you haven't already started following along with his escapades, start at the beginning and you won't be able to stop. Great stuff about body odor, bushwhacking, French women, and so forth. And, in the fine tradition of a soap opera, each post entices you to come back tomorrow for the next installment.