It's Weird

An interesting thing about playing around with online formats is seeing which things are simply not accomodated for. Which things are more difficult than they would initially seem to be. For example: making something primarily horizontal rather than vertical. The verticality of the internet is more or less arbitrary, but it is "the way things are done."

A web page is more like a scroll than a sheet of paper; it is continuous unless you make it otherwise, after all, and of an indefinite length, unlike a piece of paper. And (many) scrolls are horizontal.

And yet! It is a bit fiddly to set up a page to be horizontally oriented. It wants to be vertical. You need to get in there and be bossy about the height and the width and the alignment of everything in order to stop its defaulting to verticality. It doesn't want to extend off the screen horizontally!

I'm using CSS columns for this and it's a bit fiddly. It isn't something I use much; it's not something I see anybody anywhere use much, actually.

Something I like about a horizontal layout like this is that since it's unusual it feels very jarring even as I'm making it! Despite being perfectly legible, and not a wholly unfamiliar format for something to be in. It's rubbing my brain the wrong way. It feels like using an obscure muscle or something. Very odd.

I really like the way columned text looks. I don't like reading it much, but it's visually appealing! Newspapers are nice eyecandy, even if they are a pain to read.

I'm not sure what the best way to format navigation links in this horizontal setup would be. Centering them looks weird because it's so wide... maybe having them fixed or sticky with scrolling would be better. Or in column lists? I dunno. This is a bad layout for a lot of reasons.

Oh, I know; the bottom row should be a column rotated onto its side! Or the text could be displayed vertically one character at a time and not just in blocks like this. Hmmmm. I'll try more arrangements tomorrow, maybe. Or I'll forget about it. Either way.

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