madd0.com

I was reading this Dr. Dobb's article about ASP.NET MVC by Dino Esposito and, when scrolling down to read the end of it, I got this window:

Now obviously, the big red X is my addition, and it's there to show what a waste of precious screen real estate is going on.

I was going to write post talking of what a shame it is that today's Web is mostly vertical. Indeed, I can safely say that, form a technical point of view, it's currently a PITA to format articles such as this one to fit in a browser window in a way I call (and I'm sure others do, too) newspaper-style, i.e. by using several columns spread horizontally. Especially if you take into account the fact that horizontal space varies from one computer to another, and all the other constraints that come from working in the heterogeneous environment that is the WWW.

Now, the above statement is true in the general case, no matter what, but before criticizing a site in particular, I decided to take a look at it on a different browser than the one that I use every day, since the latter is slightly tweaked for comfort:

As you can see, the screen real estate was not being completely wasted after all. Of course, "waste" is a relative term. I'm sure all those ads are very important to Dr. Dobb's.

I still look forward to a future Web where features like CSS3's multi-column layout are implemented correctly across browsers and platforms. But then again, we all know I'm an optimist.