I'm not a designer but widows do not give me any cause to feel a site is looking shabby or untidy. The designer I work with here is always insistent that all widows are removed which is an annoying process and one I feel is unnecessary as the web is in constant flux unlike a magazine/newspaper.

 

Does anyone here worry about widows or has a designer born in the world of print who has yet to let go of certain 'rules' when migrating over to web design?

I wouldn't worry about it in web design, the designer you work with needs to learn the difference between web and print design as I honestly don't think the widows rule applies to website design. How are you getting rid of the widows anyway? Surely this would have accessibility issues on different screen resolutions and browsers anyway?

Well, the columns are fixed width and to get rid of a widow I'm just adding a <br /> tag so two words go to the next line instead of just the one. I don't think there's going to be a problem cause the text is static, but yeah, when it comes to blogs or regularly updated content then they better change their mindset cause I ain't fannying around with that.

 

Just venting really

Am I being stupid? what are windows?

Am I being stupid? what are windows?

I think widows are classed as the last word of a paragraph that carries over onto the next line?

I think it's all subjective and your correct to say on the whole web designers don't/didn't worry too much about this.

 

But perhaps with the advent of better CSS etc it's somethign we may start to notice. For sure typography around the net is improving year on year.

 

So she may have a point and that's for you to decide!

 

Seems a bit daft.. surely it'll all look wrong once you increase text size?

Seems a bit daft.. surely it'll all look wrong once you increase text size?

 

ah but does anyone actually increase text size?

 

i've only ever noticed one person do this and that was for reading type in Word. must keep a keen eye open for this in future.

 

i've worked in a very large open plan office for past 18 years, so must have seen over 1,000 people using a computer in that time.

 

additionally many sites, if they go beyond a blog like structure suffer from aesthetic oddities, so a few odd line breaks would be nothing really. my understanding was for accessibility ensure it is 100% functional and readbale and usable wiht increased font size but don't worry what it looks like (within reason).

 

That's why I asked about how you did it as surely it would go out of place when you resize text. I always resize text to my preference as I hate when text is too small or too big. The <br/> is useless as soon as the text size changes and will just end up looking stupid.

I hate widows unless its a styled quote. they look out of line.

These sort of "print" ideas have no place on the web - the two types of medium mostly have very different set sof rules, the one that spring to mind is that web pages are not a fixed canvas unlike print.

Got to agree with the print world and the web world being totally different. Widows are only an editing concept that comes from a physical end of a page. Webpages don't inherently have this problem - it's only when you try to fit content into a fix-sized container. What springs to mind is why fit content into a container and not the other way round!

But 'widows' on websites are perfectly acceptable. If I come across really offensive ones in content I'm dealing with I will edit the text to eliminate them (just like in copy-editing for print), but it's rare.

Online reading behaviour differs greatly from offline media - the most visible example of this is justified text - the standard format in print, but very rare online.

Also '<br />' tags aren't semantic and I personally would like to see them eliminated - you don't need them now that CSS has progressed so far. When it comes to reusing that content in another context - it's no longer styling independent if it's got '<br />' tags in it.

ah but does anyone actually increase text size?

 

i've only ever noticed one person do this and that was for reading type in Word. must keep a keen eye open for this in future.

 

Gotta admit, I never used to see people doing it until fairly recently. I think a lot of people simply didn't realise you could change the text size, but now it's catching on a bit. Also, I know a few people who don't increase size per-page, but do have the default size changed in preferences.

I think Widows are largely a non-issue in web media.

 

Except in special cases, for example if you have a longish H1 headline. I might check the 3 main resolutions (800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024) and make sure in no case is there a widow if that's possible to achieve. One long word widow would prob be acceptable at 800x600.

 

In paragraph text I can honestly say I have never even thought about it, but I look after all of these sorts of things when doing printable documents.

Hey, you're right. I never thought about resizing text, that would break it. Now I know why I don't bother with an easy text resizing function on the pages

 

In my searches there is a CSS widow function for printing - http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_ref_print.asp - "Sets the minimum number of lines for a paragraph that must be left at the top of a page" - which I guess is to do with stray single lines being printed on a page, rather than widowed words?

One thing to remember that IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari browsers all display text in slightly different sizes/widths even when you specify the same font size. The difference is only small but enough to tip a word onto a second line on some occasions.