Would be a good option for me since I work on a 16:10 ratio.

Mat.

I think it’s mostly an aesthetic preference.
I, for one, start reading from the left anyway ;-)
Also, one could always resize and place the browser window.

I've had this one in the works, but it's tricky with our fussy CSS - watch for a change like this to roll out with a bigger site redesign effort.

Fingers crossed you can do something about the homepage when you relaunch too :)

Admittedly, the resizing windows way could work better on Mac OS (where the maximize button expands the window just to show all the content) than on Windows (where said button lock the window to take up all the screen).
Anyway, seeing you use Firefox, if you want, I can conoct a quick & dirty user stylesheet that centers the content of Typophile.

Wow, that would be fabulous! Thanks Riccardo. :)

Please keep it decentered as it is, because in my opinion centered pages lower the readability. When the page is centered you have another contrasting area.

Please Keep it as it is.
That allows me to tile 2 Typophile pages vertically.
Thanks with Flowers

Sorry for the dealay. As I said, “quick & dirty”:

html
{text-align: center;}

#wrapper
{text-align: left;
margin: auto;}

#sidebar-right
{left: auto;
right: 0;}

Obviously, the trickiest part is the sponsor’s column ;-)

Thanks Riccardo. I've been playing with your code and finally figured out why the sidebars were not moving to appropriate places — need the !important tag in there.

Here's what I came up with for my 1680x1050 screen:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("www.typophile.com") {

html
{text-align: center;}
#wrapper
{text-align: left;
margin: auto;}

#sidebar-right
{position:absolute;
left:1340px!important;}

#sidebar-left
{position:absolute;
left:952px !important;}


That's my first time doing anything with CSS, (I didn't even know you could have user stylesheets) so this is probably quite poor/untidy. Sidebar-left takes care of the Prolific Posters and Wiki Recent Edits sidebars.

I’m glad it helped! :-)
(and also am glad it gave you the chance to play with CSS ;-)
I’m sorry I didn’t take into account #sidebar-left.
Your code isn’t particularly untidy, but it works only on your monitor (or one with the same resolution) and only in a full screen window.

Cleaning up the HTML/CSS for Typophile doesn’t really seem like that big a job. I mean, the structure is pretty simple. I assume it’s a bit of a mess with all the extra features added over the years, yes, but you could easily think of the current site as a mock-up in Photoshop. For centering a fixed width div tag inside the body tag, try margin:auto;.

What happened to the text size, btw?

"Cleaning up the HTML/CSS for Typophile doesn’t really seem like that big a job. I mean, the structure is pretty simple"

Have you seen (in the source) how many stylesheets there are?
My point being that the structure of a web site (and especially CSS, actually) can very well be much more complex to build/manage than the net result that you see on the front end.

"What happened to the text size, btw?"

Probably related to this? http://typophile.com/node/76751

I'm not a programmer, but even I could tell the CSS has been bolted together over the years: it looks horrendous. It would seem easier to rip it all out and start again.

Have you seen (in the source) how many stylesheets there are?

Yes, and that’s exactly why I’m saying it. Instead of patching the old system, why not forget about do the front end from scratch? Can’t be more than a days work.

Edit: Who disabled the blockqoutes?

I’m apparently dyslectic and I can’t edit my previous post.

There are links to 17 CSS files in the source. 17!

"Cleaning up the HTML/CSS for Typophile doesn’t really seem like that big a job"

It's always a big job. Most sites are rendering the HTML from a back end system that isn't always the easiest thing to change.

Typically, it's easier to start over from scratch rather than to 'clean up'.

"Can’t be more than a days work."

That sounds like a clientsfromhell.net quote. ;)

Please leave it flush left as it is now.

That sounds like a clientsfromhell.net quote. ;)

I’m not trying to sound smart or anything, but this really isn’t that big a job. Obviously, some of the HTML might be generated by the back end system but the main structure probably isn’t. Even so, if Typophile use PHP or ASP, the back end system typically does not generate the HTML — it would rather loop/reuse snippets of code from the HTML files. What the biggest problem usually is with old systems is the mess of conflicting CSS styles that have accumulated over the years.

If it was just a matter of adding one instance of "margin: auto" in one place, honestly
I would trust the people who have built this rather complex site to figure that one out. Not to be snide, but that seems a bit presumptuous really.

Nina, obviously not. That was only a comment to Bendy, but I see he's figured that one out himself.

frode, you're making a lot of assumptions there. In an ideal world, those would be correct assumptions, but I've learned to never assume the software is doing things the 'right' way as I've found 9 times out of 10, it isn't.

Yes, maybe I am. I have the bad habit of speaking before thinking :/

Oh, I have that habit sometimes too. Also the one where you say something too loudly about someone you didn't realise was present.