What’s behind the new max-width:800px in the inlined stylesheet? It’s a pain in the arse with no obvious benefit.
IMHO the lines got way too long on widescreens and it meant a lot of horizontal scrolling on smartphones.
I’ll probably make the width configurable.
The former is configurable by not browsing full-screen (and if someone is browsing fullscreen and the lines are too long then that’s their choice). The latter sounds like a bug in the smartphone browsers, and can be handled with media type selectors or max-width:100% on the right elements.
Oh come on, there are zillions of websites with fixed text width, for this very reason.
You may call it a bug, but it’s default behaviour on Android/WebKit. It will scale the page to such a small factor that the text is unreadable.
If you have the monitor full width, then the lines are too long. If your browsing with a thinner window, then you won’t notice that it’s 800px wide.
I totally disagree that it should be full width. If 800 is to thin then change it to 900 (or 1000 max).
I don’t understand the logic behind limiting width.
On widescreen monitors (and 16:9 in particular) vertical screen real estate is far more valuable than horizontal.
Why squander it on premature page wrapping?
The 800px wrapping significantly degraded the forum’s appearance on my 1920x1080 display.
That said, by all means have it configurable to accomodate smart phone users.
I tend to assume that fixed-width sites are because the designer didn’t want to make a scalable design. And I can’t think offhand of any fixed-width forum design.
Yep, I call that a bug. But, as I say, there are workarounds which don’t affect people using other browsers.
Nonsense. I typically have my browser about 1400 pixels wide (out of 1920). I noticed that from using the space well it went to wasting almost half of it, and the line wrapping on the front page made it a lot slower to skim.
If I have to create a user style sheet then so be it. I haven’t noticed anyone complaining that it’s too wide, but I don’t know whether that’s because no-one has a problem or because the people who do also know how to create user style sheets. What I will say is that the layout works better above 1000px than below.
The logic behind limiting width is that it is hard to read if its too wide. That is you can’t scan your eyes back to the next line easily. This is why newspapers columns etc are approximately 80 characters wide.
Personally i think the problem is that CSS and other things suck at giving the designer the right tools. You should be able to specify width in terms of the font, not pixels. Or better it should have better “scale free” layout options. Does html 5 fix any of this?
What about different CSS for mobile devices?
Ever since I moved above a 1280x1024 screen to a 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 I have stopped making things full screen, especially browsers.
I do agree that it looks funky, but this is why you should simply make it windowed instead. Most websites dont utilize much over 1000ish width. Heck a lot of the “design books” even newer ones still reference 1024x768 as a standard or 1280x1024. My old laptop(which isnt that old) could only do 1024x768 and my new one I think only does 1280x960 or something. I personally hate horizontal scrolling. Though a nice wordwrap feature is nice. I also hate super long single line sentences.
I intentionally make new lines in a lot of emails to force the width down. If you have ever taken advance speed reading courses, often times you gain benefit from having a certain width, because you read straight down instead of the left to right, down, left to right. Because you use peripheral to pick up the full width(impossible with wide width)
//end rant tldr
I still think some sort of flexible screen fitting thing is best. I havent worked much with SMF but I know the forum platforms Ive worked with do allow custom themes per user, or at least some sort of auto flexibility depending on browser(or browser size)
Some adventurous forum user should make a JGO forum app 
You can. Sizes in CSS can be given in ems rather than pixels. It’s just not used much. CSS does suck at giving the designer the right tools for layout in general, but that’s another story.