Jay Small recently addressed the issue of whether online news sites should use expandable tables as opposed to what is a pretty solid industry standard of fixed-width tables built for 800x600-pixel displays.

He concludes that "we're stuck with 800x600 as the low common denominator for a while longer," based mainly on data which suggests that somewhere between 35 and 47 percent of Web use occurs on this low-resolution setting.

I'm not sure that we in the news industry should be so eager to move to accordion-style tables, period.

On its face, the argument to fill the entire screen regardless of resolution seems pretty logical. The set width is limiting. And why let all that real estate go to waste?

But in the case of online news sites specifically -- due to the text-link nature of headline-driven content -- I think filling the entire screen is overwhelming at any resolution. Try it out. IT'S JUST TOO MUCH.

Or in the case of the Las Vegas Review-Journal's full-screen expandable design, too little.

The glaring hole in this screenshot demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining consistency across resolutions within the content area. It works out pretty well at 800x600, but bump your screen resolution up to 1024x768 and suddenly there are huge chunks of open white space right in the middle of your most valuable real estate.

(In the interest of full disclosure, this shot was taken from December 2002 courtesy of the Wayback Machine because the front is currently inhabited by a special war coverage table which, as Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman points out, has its own problems... and I should add that the R-J is my old stomping ground -- love you guys! =)

This type of design also becomes problematic once you're inside the site.

I won't even start on the many problems I have with the Arizona Daily Star's choice to completely change both layout and navigation on its inside pages. There is one positive consequence though: They haven't made the more likely error of allowing story content to stretch too wide.

Why is this a problem? Glad you asked. Once a line of text runs too wide, it becomes difficult to read, because the eye can no longer make a natural, effortless leap down to the next line. Go back to the R-J's story, pick a couple paragraphs in the middle of the page where text is stretching across the length of the content well and read aloud.

Unless you have some phenomenal peripheral vision, you will notice a slight pause in your speech between lines as your eye is forced to travel all the way back across the page to pick up your place again. While it probably doesn't register on a conscious level for most readers, it is more difficult to read than a narrower column of text. The print industry has known this for... well, a really long time. Let's not abandon that wisdom simply because we're moving onto a new medium.

So how wide is too wide? I don't have an exact pixel-width answer, but you're reading within a 588-pixel cell right now and I think I'm really pushing the outer bounds. I'd say as a general rule, you don't want to go above 580 and ideally you probably want to fall within a range of 500-560.

April 12, 2003