istio.io blogs real estate issue

[linsun]

When reviewing our blogs on istio.io, i noticed that we have too many spaces on the left and right side. Seems wasting a lot of real estate. This makes blog a little hard to read. See screenshot:

[dhawton]

I can take this on

[linsun]

cc @craigbox as you designed the new site if you have any input

[linsun]

Thanks Daniel!!

[craigbox]

Hah, I just found this through searching as to why the width of the blog posts had changed!

The reason they were the width they were is that there's a maximum words per line that lets people read the fastest. That's why newspapers are laid out in columns, for example. Research suggests it actually makes things easier to read.

I would suggest we revert this, but I'm hoping we will have some resources to do a more thorough

If nothing else, we should be consistent with content pages like https://istio.io/latest/about/service-mesh/.

[dhawton]

I don't know if I agree with the line length for readability. With websites, there is a move to reduce excess whitespace... for example, for people with 2k-4k monitors, it seems odd to have 50% or more just be blank space on the edges for a blog post. Modern "newspapers" seem to go have adopted the fluid content model as well when it comes to individual articles. As far as consistency across the different sections, I agree with this... but it seemed like there were multiple and different definitions across the CSS. I was going to address this, but saw a comment about a rewrite (not aware of any timelines, however).

[craigbox]

Get yourself an ultra-wide monitor, sit in the middle of it, and then measure the neck strain trying to read content that is hard left :)

[dhawton]

I basically have that with 3 32 inch screens. ;)