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Why most Web pages are formatted in portrait orientation?

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Why most Web pages are formatted in portrait orientation? Last time I checked most PC monitors were 4:3 wide. Browsing gets even worse with new 16:9 displays. Some sites do resize with the browser window, but good chunk of them doesn't. I guess one might say 'what if user wants to print it'? I don't honestly know how often typical Web user prints pages, but I personally do it very infrequently compared to how many pages I read.

Is there a reason or is it simply a tradition?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
    Because most web sites are designed by people used to doing magazine layouts? Just a thought :)
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
    With the advent of CSS stylesheets, it's easily possible to create a print stylesheet which prints out portrait and a view stylesheet which displays landscape. Oh, and this was possible about 3-4 years ago (IE5/Moz 0.x)!

    Unfortunately the takeup on CSS was very slow to begin with. Thankfully it's getting better now.

    http://www.alistapart.com/topics/css/
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
    Roland took my answer. :)
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
    Look at newspaper print. Narrower columns are easier to scan and read.

    Hey, Web pages on a whole can conform to monitor size, no problem, but text on the page should conform to what's easiest to read.
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2004
    I tend to disagree. Too often I see sites that 'accomodate 800x600 resolution' AND include ads at the left (20%) and at the right (50%). Total reading space: 30% of 800 px or 240 px. C'mon, this is PDA display I am facing staring at 1280x1024 monitor! :) Oh, and it is very pleasant to read 240x1024 column ;-)

    I would agree with newspaper columns issue if Web site would behave like newspaper. I.e. when I resize browser window, second and then third column would appear like it happens when you unfold the newspaper.
  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2004
    Mikhail,

    I am not quite sure whom you are disagreeing with here, but the scenario that you are describing fits perfectly into the explanation that I provided.

    To clarify my previous comment a little more, I don't believe that readability is the primary reason the fixed layout is used. The primary reason is to solve the problem of fitting all of the content horizontally without scrolling.

    Fixing the width provides a simple and consistent solution to that problem.

    By the way, I have experimented with "unfolding newspaper columns" idea for a while, but was unable to provide an implementation that didn't suffer from some sort of accessibility issue.

    International Herald Tribune (http://iht.com) is a decent approximation of the idea. Go to one of the articles and click on "A+" button at the bottom until three columns would turn into one. This illustrates the fact that the columns are built dynamically on the client.

    On the downside, if you try to browse this article with JAWS, you will discover that the entire text of the article is read to you 3 times (or current # columns on the page). This happens because the developers trick us into believing that they are splitting the text into columns, while they are merely triplicating the content in divs of smaller width and adjust the scrollHeight to create the illusion of the columns.
  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2004
    Basically the web was designed to display documents, primarily reports and whitepapers and other prose.

    Simply think of a word processing document. Nearly all are "portrait" because the target is the printed page. The web was meant as a retrieval mechanism for such documents.

    It wasn't for displaying artwork, or newspapers, or magazines. There were no left or right margins full of ads.

    Don't forget the display resolutions typically available back then. Consider the default type sizes for paragraphs, headers, etc. There just wasn't the real-estate to think of the screen as a "page" of information. It was always a "window" on a "page" of text and vertical scrolling or paging was the only way to go.

    I agree that expanding/collapsing multi-column formatting would be great. There are some headaches in implementing such a thing though.
  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2004
    Seems to me that the css solution doesn't work as well as it should if at all sometimes (re: printing in landscape mode) ... cross browser support for such a stylesheet seems to be limited from my experience.

    I'm still looking for a nice clean way to print large tables cross browser in css. Maybe I'll be looking for some time to come...
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
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