multicolumn web browsers

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

In 2000, I gave some thought to multicolumn web browser layout, but
apparently the only fragment that ever made it onto kragen-tol was the
following, from "Phone browsers suck", 2000-08-20:

	On the other front, ever-growing screens on PCs present the
	opposite problem --- how to usefully use a screen the size of
	two sheets of A4 paper side by side?  Interface idioms that
	worked well on smaller screens --- a menubar along the top,
	single-column text filling the screen, icons sized by pixels
	--- become clumsy.

So I thought I should write about it, as I came across this passage in
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elastic ("Elastic Design", by
Patrick Griffiths, 2004-01-09, A List Apart magazine):

	The other solution is to use a liquid layout in which the
	width of the content area isn't specified at all so that the
	text flows to fit to the width of the screen (HTML Dog uses
	this solution). Many would argue that this renders the content
	less readable on large displays, but it is beneficial for
	smaller displays such as those on mobile devices.

Maybe he should have said "on large displays with the browser window
filling the whole width of the screen", since the problem is with wide
browser windows, not wide screens or large screens.

The problem is that wide columns of text have long lines, and it
becomes more difficult to scan back to the beginning of the next line.
The oldest writing systems generally solved this problem by
alternating lines between left-to-right and right-to-left
("boustrophedon" text), but this imposes other cognitive difficulties
in reading the text.

So the solution generally adopted --- in newspapers, dictionaries, and
research papers --- is to lay out the text in multiple columns.

With Apple's 30-inch-diagonal 100dpi display widely available and
multiple-screen solutions becoming common, it's well past time to
adopt this solution for web browsers as well.  Multiple narrow browser
windows are OK for those who are reading tidbits from many sources,
but a single large browser window is much better for reading a single
long document.

So my proposed solution is to render the web page into a
horizontally-narrow space as usual, but then rather than navigating
that horizontally-narrow space by seeing a small part of it and
dragging a scrollbar up and down to see more, you slice it into
columns, each the height of your window, and put the columns next to
each other, left to right.  Now there is no vertical scrollbar, but
there may be a horizontal scrollbar for very long web pages or small
windows.

Probably the column break should usually render as if it were a <br
clear="both"> (in Netscape2ese), moved up until it is actually on the
desired page --- so that images, lines of text, and so forth, don't
get cut in half by it.  In many cases, though, tables will have to get
cut.

It's probably desirable to be able to adjust the page width and page
height with the mouse, which should make it possible to work around
whatever brain-damage results from badly-placed column breaks.

In some cases, it would be nice to handle images and other things that
overflow beyond the column width by displaying the overflow in the
next column.

-- 
Kragen Javier Sitaker in Caracas, trying to get a clue