I've been thinking that through today, actually. Newspapers don't choose multi-column layouts because it's the easiest to read--it's to make the most of an expensive resource available in a fixed size. Besides that, imagine the UX difficulty in unrolling a pre-Gutenberg scroll to catch up on the day's news!
For a computer, even if you could fit 4-8 text columns on a 5K monitor... What do you do if the content demands a 5th-9th column? You'll have to scroll.
As someone else pointed out in the first iteration of my design here, using non-standard behavior for the margin notes in the mobile view meant it took experimenting to figure out that tapping on a cross-in-a-circle icon would expand additional flavor text. A distinctly un-cool surprise.
When presented with a multi-column text layout, would a user know how to intuitively use the site? They're trained to look for a scrollbar on the right side of the screen to indicate "Hey, friend! More content below." Would you keep adding columns and scroll horizontally indefinitely? There are a lot of challenges to overcome in that design.
The appeal of the Tufte-styled site, for me, is the side notes/margin notes. The whole site is ~1200px wide in three columns. 200px nav, 600px text body, and 315px side notes--the rest is padding between columns. The design takes advantage of the "wasted" space to add in delicious flavor text that I'd otherwise cram in with loads of em dashes and lengthy parenthetical asides.
I designed the page on a/for a 1080p screen, assuming most 4K+ users are used to seeing websites hang out in the middle of their massive TV-sized displays.
Someday, though, it'd be interesting to see if there's a way to combine more information density on a high resolution display without sacrificing readability/usability.
My display is only 1900 wide, and it annoys me to scroll 80-character columns. Especially when they blow up to 30+ points, and I need to resize the browser window.
If WP for DOS could format multi-column pages, I can't imagine that it's that hard. Scrolling sideways is pretty intuitive. And it's become common for image slideshows. Or one could replace continuous scrolling with jumping to the next page.
Side scrolling is also common for online epub readers, and with a visual 'assist' of looking like a book, or large left-right arrows it's rather intuitive.
I think my next blog redesign might incorporate a 'book-ish' horizontal scroll, rather than the infinite vertical scroll...
> If WP for DOS could format multi-column pages, I can't imagine that it's that hard
Funnily enough browsers have this support already (using column-width, or a prefix version of it), so for the web it's basically free, and trivial to add to a site:
For a computer, even if you could fit 4-8 text columns on a 5K monitor... What do you do if the content demands a 5th-9th column? You'll have to scroll.
As someone else pointed out in the first iteration of my design here, using non-standard behavior for the margin notes in the mobile view meant it took experimenting to figure out that tapping on a cross-in-a-circle icon would expand additional flavor text. A distinctly un-cool surprise.
When presented with a multi-column text layout, would a user know how to intuitively use the site? They're trained to look for a scrollbar on the right side of the screen to indicate "Hey, friend! More content below." Would you keep adding columns and scroll horizontally indefinitely? There are a lot of challenges to overcome in that design.
The appeal of the Tufte-styled site, for me, is the side notes/margin notes. The whole site is ~1200px wide in three columns. 200px nav, 600px text body, and 315px side notes--the rest is padding between columns. The design takes advantage of the "wasted" space to add in delicious flavor text that I'd otherwise cram in with loads of em dashes and lengthy parenthetical asides.
I designed the page on a/for a 1080p screen, assuming most 4K+ users are used to seeing websites hang out in the middle of their massive TV-sized displays.
Someday, though, it'd be interesting to see if there's a way to combine more information density on a high resolution display without sacrificing readability/usability.