Fixed width rendering is ridiculous

[werner_daehn]

This is how the new blog posts look like on a 4k display. (click on the images and pretend your monitor is large enough to show the entire image at once)

Lots of white space left and right, images are too small to see. Okay, I can set the zoom factor to 400% to get the full width being used, but is that so much better?

In contrast, this is how a Wikipedia page renders

There are two flawed assumptions here:

1. The assumption that 672px width is a common display width. That was true 20 years ago.

2. The assumption that all displays are similar size. Which is totally wrong. We have display width from 1024 to 4096 pixel or larger. The dpi are different as well, it could be a 2k monitor with 40" or a 4k tablet with 8".

HTML takes care of all of that, yet it is actively prevented by forcing a fixed width.

The solution would be simple:

1. No absolute width but percent.

2. In the editor a tag to start a new paragraph to avoid images being out of sync with the text, e.g. a long paragraph with a right hand image should be rendered as one paragraph. The next paragraph should start below the image. Just like Wikipedia does as well.

3. Optionally show differently sized images. On a large screen the original image, on smaller screens the resized version, responsive design: <img srcset="image-b.jpg" src="image-a.jpg" alt="an image" />

[tamira · Accepted solution]

Hi Werner,

The width of the blog post was reduced for some reason and that is a bug I can confirm. In general the content is as wide as a comment (960 px as far as I remember).

That already helps a bit. Personally I do agree that the amount of whitespace should be reduced and the feedback that you and other community members give about this proves the need to improve, therefore we raised this to our user experience team to consider and are now waiting for an answer.

Thanks and regards,

Gabi

[werner_daehn]

I appreciate your support here.

In the 1990's there had been the infamous "best viewed with Internet Explorer and 1024x800 resolution". That had been the most problematic page design because what are you going to do if you do no fall into that category? Buy a new computer? Install Internet Explorer just to view that page? Of course not. So this fixed screen size died quickly, except at SAP. We try to be a modern company and yet use design principles everybody else gave up for good reasons 20 years ago. Not good.

Hence I implore you to make that change now. Right now. Prior to rolling out the new version. And frankly, however is responsible for that fixed width design should get challenged if he is fit for the position.

Since you asked about other impressions

• page design: Very modern, good to read, logical - like it
• moving from spaces to tags: Brilliant. Now we can agree to use the same tags and add a "find similar content" link by simply providing a link to the search page with tags prepopulated.
• Performance could be better, though.

btw, I just turned off the max-width: 960px in the div main-content. Screen renders nicely. So it is that one single item causing all.

And of course we can improve later, dynamically adjust the font size, different source image versions as explained before  (<img srcset="image-b.jpg" src="image-a.jpg"alt="an image" />) for the browser to pick the best suited one.

[Former Member]

Hi Werner,

based on Gabi's response I am adding to both feedback and known bugs. Feedback for reducing whitespace, and bugs due to Gabi's response above. Thanks again for testing and providing feedback.

with kind regards,

Bill

[Former Member]

Hi Werner,

Thank you for testing beta, and thank you for your feedback. I have added to the feedback log.

with kind regards,

Bill

[werner_daehn]

Do you concur with me that such a change requires to review all posts for proper formatting?

Do you concur with me that reviewing all posts is required for the current change as well?

Then it would be the proper time now.

Btw, this request is nothing new, there is a lengthy post about it from 2012 where people agreed that this is important.

[Former Member]

Hi Werner,

First let me say thank you for your passion to make community a more user friendly and awesome forum to share ideas and solve problems.  I looked at the screen print you had above, but couldn't quite see the problem you expressed until I reviewed the link https://blogs.sap.com/2016/03/26/hana-smart-data-integration-transactional-consistency-and-delta-han....

I will ask someone else who is more knowledgeable in design to respond to your questions, because they are great questions.  Thank you again for being a part of testing in beta.

with kind regards,

Bill

[werner_daehn]

Bill, it is quite simple. The text body of every blog post is 672px wide, correct? Just inspect the parent div element like I did in the screenshot.

So whatever display you are viewing the text, it will have a white space area left and right. My notebook here has 2560px width, so you use 672pixel and the remaining 1888pixel are white space. As a result you have to scroll down a lot. And really looks terrible, a huge white space with some text in the middle.

That's like printing a book on 50'000 pages just because, for whatever reasons, the margin left and right is 80% of the entire page width, only 20% is used for the text.

And my notebook has an average resolution only, 4000 pixel wide displays get the norm with bigger resolutions coming. Now imagine you would look at that text in two years when 8k screens start to be affordable.

The entire situation gets really awkward when you consider the fact that most screenshots in the blogs are scaled down and are barely readable as result. And why? To fit the 672pixel width!?!?!!!

The only reason for that is CSS formatting is simpler with fixed width. Simpler. A proper CSS renders beautifully on all screen resolutions, all zoom factors, all font sizes without you having to do anything.

[Former Member]

Hi Werner,

Thanks for the clarification. I understand the technical details. I just don't understand why it was done. This is where I need the help of someone else . But thank you for making this simpler for me, I can always use that.

What are your thoughts about the new community other than resolution?

with kind regards,

Bill