Styles: add option to customize side margins in all styles

[ninetydegrees]

Title:
Styles: add option to customize side margins in all styles

Area:
styles

Summary:
Transmogrified has an option to customize side margins, making the whole page narrower or larger. I suggest it be extended to all styles.

Description:
Prompted by a comment from someone who thought most Dreamwidth styles were very large. It's true. Most styles use the full page width or close to it and don't have an option to let you change this in Customize.

Poll #4427 Styles: add option to customize side margins in all styles

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 56

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
50 (89.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (10.7%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[zvi]

I agree that this should be implemented more widely, but it already does apply to all of the Tabula Rasa derived styles. Unless you mean something different than what is available in Tab Ras, in which case, I'm not understanding your suggestion.

[matgb]

I can't see anything on the side margins for Tab Ras, there's the ability to change sidebar width, but the suggestion is for applying whitespace/padding to both sides of the layout, making it centered with gaps each side.

Eg: my layout has a max-width:1200px applied, as if I use a really large monitor I hate it when the text in the main column gets too wide. That's different to being able to set the width of the sidebar, which is what I think you'r ethinking of. Either that or we're talking at complete cross purposes.

[zvi]

No, you're right. I was thinking of the sidebars, not the whitespace.

[msilverstar]

I am so going to try that! I wonder if there's a way to set a minimum for a column width... I hate two-inch-wide journal layouts.

[matgb]

There is, yes, cunningly enough, min-width:whatever.

You'd need to choose which column, naturally, so for the main entry column, on most styles you'd want something like
#primary { min-width:500px;} and would need to play around with the width settings I suspect a fair bit. Might be better to set it in ems rather than px, but that's a taste thing.

[ex_rising236]

Or to set it in percentages, which is what I currently do so that it's fluid-width to the width of my browser, which is useful for when I go and log on from somewhere like school.

[matgb]

Problem with setting a min width as a percentage is it sort of defeats the point, especially on one of the types of screen that we're trying to help out.

Last night, friend was visiting, he has a DW account he uses to read our locked entries, and we were showing him how to do more with the site in general. On his Asus Eee with an 800px screen.

Because the sidebars each had set width in the standard layouts, and Jennie's using a three column display, her main actual content column was tiny.

What I need to do for my layout, and would like to see for others, is some way that, on a screen that small, the main column stays at a readable width, and the sidebars fall gracefully to below it--that works much better on smaller screens and some mobile devices than having a horizontal scroll.

Even if you set min width:60%, on an Eee it would still look a bit strange. My netbook has a 1024px display, but it cost a fair bit more, etc.

So many different ways of looking at a website these days, and that's only going to increase with the proliferation of smartphones and similar.

[quicksilver_ink]

I don't know enough CSS to make my own styles, so I'm generally in favor of things that allow me more customization options once I pick a style.