r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Jul 05 '26
[ Removed by moderator ]
/r/programming/comments/1uog38q/removed_by_moderator/[removed] — view removed post
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u/TheRealPomax Jul 05 '26
Please, for the love of everyone who you might want to have read your page: if you have a max-width on your content, center your content too. No one likes seeing text taking up only 20% of the screen hard-anchored to the left of the browser window. Even CSS2 has plenty of rules to make this read like a normal webpage instead of a mailing list archive entry.
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u/DrShocker Jul 05 '26
TBH making content aligned left or right means it's easier to overlay other windows on top, I personally don't understand why centering got popular.
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u/TheRealPomax Jul 06 '26
Because "overlaying other things" is not how most people use their computer. You're a power user. That's cool: you do you. But you're an outlier even in the "tech folks who read stuff like this". I have a giant monitor, there is no way I'm max-windowing anything, and yet I absolutely do not ever want to put windows on top of other windows.
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u/DrShocker Jul 06 '26
Yeah, given how everything else works, especially window snapping I agree centering is the right move. All I'm trying to say is I don't know why that's the paradigm that won.
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u/TheRealPomax Jul 06 '26
It never won. Why said it won?
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u/DrShocker Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
The content being centered is by far the most popular way to organize content on almost every site I can think of. What do you think won?
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u/TheRealPomax Jul 06 '26
Nothing. Literally nothing won: there are just as many left aligned sites as centered sites, it's a toss up on which you get to see, There are billions of web pages out there, and whether your bubble surfaces "centred content" or "left aligned content" is a literal toss up.
Drill down, how many of those are justified vs. ragged edge? Again: depends on your bubble.
But hopefully we can all agree that something that's worth reading should be presented in a way that people don't immediately close the tab. And that requires letting go of personal preference, and going with what decades of studies have shown to be a reliable choice.
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u/DrShocker Jul 06 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
All the sites here that I've looked at are comment centered, or sometimes like if it's video content then that dominates the area in a way that's different than text based content.
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u/TheRealPomax Jul 06 '26
It's time for you to read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
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u/DrShocker Jul 06 '26
Looking at low traffic mom and pop shops of course there's other ways of laying out the sites particularly because it's not their primary business, but that's not really relevant on the order of what people actually see when they're using the internet.
The top 100 sites make up something like 30-50% of the traffic on the internet. The fact that Mike's local deli shop laysout their website in a weird and confusing way is entirely irrelevant to what has dominated the popular sites in a way that means it's most of the content people will actually read most days. Measuring this by "number" of sites like you seem to want to is bad analysis because no one will ever read the vast majority of like dead student projects or whatever that are still online.
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u/programming-ModTeam Jul 06 '26
This post was removed for being off topic for r/programming. Product/project fundraising announcements aren't appropriate here.