User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Layout Changes: Breakpoints and Typography/@comment-5275700-20150520212753/@comment-24416108-20150522063815

"With regard to your comment about “stability” of the platform, I think it’s important to differentiate between “stable” and “static”. Stable, available, reliable, functional — these are definitely what we strive for, and achieve most of the time. But you seem to be hoping for a more static experience, based on your choice of words. We are indeed hoping to make Wikia feel more modern. This is an ongoing process that includes the general layout and structure of the site, the look and feel of the page elements that are present on every page. It also includes developing tools to help editors create content in a way that works well on all devices, displays and platforms (better tools is something else you touched on in your comments). But for every change that someone perceives as helpful or progressive, someone else may feel that it’s unnecessary and restrictive. Again, we’re never going to find the perfect solution for everyone, but we can keep trying. Wikia is a software company and we iterate, learn, evolve and move forward."

In a way, we need a static base just the same - were making CSS and JS changes, and for example in my case, it's the sole instance I'm using it, and I'm glad to get it working. While I've checked around and this update seems to have broken nothing, if there would be something broken, I wouldn't know how to fix it - because I don't know where it breaks. Therefore, a certain amount of "static" is required, otherwise we can't build a functional site on top of it.

"Similarly to what you are talking about in your comment, very long/wide lines of text also require extra eye motion or even head motion, which is tiring for the reader, and that’s one of the reasons for the reduced maximum width."

I understand, and hence I don't really mind the reduced width(although it seems somewhat...blunt to me, I couldn't give a good alternative. )

"Regarding release methods and timelines, we’re always working on the best ways to roll out specific changes and updates. This week is clearly not an example of “the best”, and the feedback from you and others is helpful in efforts to improve."

Have you ever considered the idea I mentioned regarding a mail to all admins? Or otherwise just to the ones who have mail notifications on. The bottom-right corner is often filled with messages that are completely irrelevant to me, and I saw the one for this change exactly 1 day before the change went online. I don't know if it's been there before, but I've learned to ignore those messages anyway.

TBH, I'd defend your decision to send it to all admins regardless of preference - it's a global change, and if an admin wants to ignore a change like this, I'd question his fitness for adminhood first.

"But I think that your notes leave out a very important variable that’s a big factor — the viewer’s distance from the screen. At a certain distance, the text can also become too small to read."

While I see and understand, there's to be considered an amount of fine-tuning every reader will need to do for himself. From the part of the side, we're unable to determine someone's distance from the screen, or his preference. If the amount of zoomers would decrease, you're completely right, but we're never going to see statistics, and I think it didn't - because the larger screens generally are owned by the people who spend more time online - not those with eye problems.(not talking about glasses here.) People buy bigger screen because they want to see more at a time, not because they want to make everything bigger.

What I might not have mentioned above is that it's hard for me to check how the other breakpoints look. An issue mentioned was that wide-screen users don't care about the smaller screen sizes, but having a small screen myself, I have no idea what they're seeing either. I think we can both agree everyone needs to have the best experience possible on their screen, and if there'd be a way to preview a page for the screen sizes you're not using yourself, that would be a very good change IMO.

Thank you for your time.