Webpage widths

I have a wide 24" monitor, and find that many webpages only fill the centre 50%, is there anyway to get them to fill better?
Examples: BBC, Dogpile (my main browser)
And, i don'y mean to use CTRL & + to zoom in, I want it to do it automatically by re-formmattig text etc, but can see how this maybe difficult.
NOTE: I currently use Firefox, is Chorme better, and for this issue?

 

Greetings, smurph...

There's really nothing you can do about it, other than zooming. Different browsers may have different ways of zooming, and some allow the enlargement of certain aspects of a webpage (ie: zoom text only, etc.), but the actual content width is written into the web page's code.

For example: when I write a page I can specify a width of 100% for the background and 50% for a table, or I can specify a pixel width such as 600px for a <div> - but all of that is hard-coded into the page. You (the end user) can't change that.

 

Thanks, thought as much, but wanted toask and make sure.
A shame, as it means that modern trend of going to wide monitors, doesn't suit web browsing, one of the main reasons for using a PC, I'd be better with it rotated 90 degrees!! Surely, how webpages are written should follow the trend?!

 

Good morning...

I agree. Many webpages are still created with generators that adhere to older guidelines that were written for the 4:3 monitor ratio instead of today's 16:9 standard.

There are scripts that can be used to identify a user's monitor resolution - the page can then use that information to generate widths, etc. from a style sheet. However, that's a lot of additional work for the designer.

When I write a website, I test on different monitors to verify aesthetics. In my opinion, I doubt that very many of today's designers care as much as I do.

 

By the time widescreen computer monitors were being promoted, many web sites had hundreds of pages that were generated for
smaller monitors with a more narrow aspect ratio.

As Caliban mentioned, most web pages were designed with a specific width. If a monitor was too narrow to contain the entire
width of the page, the browser produced horizontal scroll bars so the entire page could be viewed.

The Opera web browser has a Fit to Width view option that adjusts the width of the page to fit the width of the display window, if the page is too wide.

There are basically three ways of defining a web page width: fixed, elastic and liquid (or fluid).
Fixed width has a set size in width and does not adjust at all.
Elastic is much the same as fixed except that it uses a unit of measure equal to the current font size, so it adjusts as the
font size is increased or decreased.
Liquid uses percentages to define widths so that it is much more flexible. However, it is more difficult to design that way.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each method. With a Liquid design, a web page display can become much too wide
if displayed on a large high resolution monitor. A good liquid design will specify both maximum and minimum widths.
Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 and earlier do not recognize any of those specifications.

If you were able to make all of those web pages fill the width of your widescreen monitor, you probably would not like the result.
The lines of text become ridiculously long and difficult to read. There are plenty of designs that do just that, and as you
have most likely already noticed, it is annoying.

When I was looking for a new monitor three years ago, I specifically did Not want a widescreen model.
Once the width is at least 1024, that is sufficient to display the entire width of nearly all web pages.
What I wanted was more height, not excessive width, but by then most of the retail stores had only a couple of
'standard' width monitors available, and some stores had None!
I ordered a 19 inch LCD with a 5:4 ratio, not the older 4:3, so the height is similar to a 22 inch widescreen.

Widescreen monitors were heavily promoted, largely because it is more cost effective to cut panels with those dimensions.
The widescreen dimensions more closely fit the dimensions of the panels from which the monitor panels are cut, so there is
less material wasted. The actual display area of a 19 inch 4:5 monitor is greater than that of a 19 inch 16:9 monitor.

 

Good info there, mjnc. Personally I like the widescreens, but I know that many of my customers do not.

My wife, for instance, uses a Samsung SyncMaster 913v (19.0 inch, aspect ratio of 5:4) at 1280 x 1024 - and she has threatened to cut off my hands (or worse) if I ever try to install a widescreen on her desk.

 

I agree. But, I don't think that negates the desirability of a widescreen monitor. Just size your browser window so that it does not consume the full width of your screen. That way, you have some room to see some part of another program window (email, word processing, spreadsheet, whatever) at the same time you see your browser window. I believe this is certainly one reason widescreen monitors now dominate the market; you have enough screen width to feasibly view more than one program window at the same time.