web design ✨ 

There’s this thing websites do where they correctly take to heart that a comfortable reading width is a certain fixed length relative to the text size, but then they cram it into a single endless centered column that can’t do anything with the space on either side without adding some extra elements or sticky-outy images. It’s not strictly *bad,* but I don’t think it’s interesting or creative, and it may be frustrating when your screen is much wider than it is tall.

My preference is to follow in the steps of what the field of printing figured out centuries ago: Columns.

It is possible (though frustrating) to do 100% CSS wrapping columns, so that your text fills the full viewport height, and then wraps to a new column, scrolling to the right instead of down. I think this is a much more natural and useful layout, and it can use the space in a more aesthetically pleasing way

web design ✨ 

@vy I love marginal notes, and I think for online text they could be great with like images and stuff. but back in the Bronze Age when I learned CSS there was no comfortable way to implement margin notes in the box model. I wonder if it's easy these days...

web design ✨ 

@elilla @vy definitely a lot more doable with grids nowadays, basically similar to joshwcomeau.com/css/full-bleed
(which also inspired vy's post i think), and putting the note divs in one of the side columns

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web design ✨ 

@elilla @vy really like the idea of this so will definitely try implement something like that in my new site, also with the way my static site gen (shayu.it) parses MDX (mdxjs.com) it would be a great way to represent them while writing

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