The Future of Reading
Bill Hill’s Blog
A key concept behind Adaptive Layout is that information on the Web has to become just like water. Water doesn’t just flow; it also takes the shape of the container into which it’s poured. In other words, it should adapt to the screen on which it’s being read.
The starting point should always be the human who’s actually reading the content.
Let me try to describe my ideal scenario, and then see how it fits into an Adaptive Layout world.
First, there’s a big difference between browsing for content, and then focusing on a piece of content in order to read it.
Paginated Content
When I’m browsing, I want easy access to all the tools of the browser – menus, buttons, toolbars etc.
But when I’m reading, everything on the screen which isn’t content is just a distraction and a waste of space. I want it to all go away. When I’ve browsed to a piece of content I want to read, I should be able to hit a “Reading” button, and only content, and perhaps some basic navigation buttons like “Next page”, “Previous page”, and a button to get me back to Browsing mode, should be visible. The F11 shortcut on Internet Explorer, for example, makes the browser go full-screen. It’s not discoverable enough today, and not effectively used by any sites I know of, but the capability’s there.
Next page, Previous page? Well, yes, the content should be paginated. Research has shown consistently that paging is much better for reading than scrolling.
What should a “page” look like? It should look like the full size of whatever screen I’m using. If the browser knows the text size the reader wants to use, then it knows the width of a column. If it knows the size of the display, then it can calculate how many columns to display.
If you then throw in all the typographic techniques we’ve learned over 550 years like kerning, ligatures, great word- and letter-spacing, etc. you get text that’s as readable as text on paper. Since you know how many columns are in use, you have a grid for placement of graphics.
To see this kind of layout at work, take a look at the New York Times Reader, or the Seattle P-I Reader. They were both created using the proprietary Windows Presentation Foundation technology. But the same thing can be done on the Web, using Web-standard content.
Instead of trying to hold on to the past, the design community and software developers should be working together to develop this technology and make it mainstream for the Web.
It took hundreds of years to develop the state of the art in readable text on paper. We’ve been creating and reading Web content for less than 20 years. We’re still at the “caveman painting on a wall” stage as far as creating content which can be read on the whole range of screens is concerned.
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The Alphabet:
I’m not typing this on my normal laptop. The one I normally take on the road with me didn’t die – but it might as well have!
The problem’s so simple you’d think you can just work around it. The letter “e” on the keyboard stopped working.
As key failures go, it couldn’t have been any worse. Cryptographers and code-breakers have known for a very long time that E is the most-used letter in the English language – and I presume for just about any of the Latin-based languages, too. So its #1 in the Frequency Table of letters you try when cracking simple substitution codes.
Yes, there’s a workaround. The spell-checker in Word, for instance, will automatically turn “kyboard” into “keyboard” – but it doesn’t catch anything like all of the missing letters automatically, and selecting suggestions manually is a pain when every second or third word has a red squiggle under it.
Of course, if you’re really stuck, you can always find an
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