User blog comment:Susanolivia/Experience the new Wikia/@comment-93604-20100926123643/@comment-93604-20100926200023

@Sarah Manley. It is good to try to please users. Wikis come in all shapes and sizes. The wiki I work on has many images in a column on the right side of some pages. Over time most pages on my wiki will have this right-side column of images. This shrinks the text column width. As do the many videos in the main text of some pages. Some pages do not have images yet.

No single width of content space will work. Also, there are many bare URLs that look bad if they wrap to 2 lines. Squished content space makes many things look bad on my wiki. How will that please users? My wiki is not really a heavy text site in prose format with lots of paragraphs to read. It would be nice if there were some optional text templates for those few page sections with multiple text paragraphs. See:
 * http://www.google.com/#q=multi-column+CSS

Maybe tie the multi-column CSS tools to detection of screen widths. I am looking at an 8 by 10 inch monthly print publication, and it has various formats on its pages. 2-column, 3-column, single-column full-page ads with large fonts and many images in the ads, etc.. Web page layout is evolving, and still catching up with print layout. The tools may or may not exist that will allow the number of columns of text to adapt to monitor sizes. I believe the width of the screen can be detected by the page script. See:
 * http://www.google.com/#q=detect+screen+resolution

Not that I understand all of this, here is a page: "How to detect screen size and apply a CSS style" (comments cover more issues):
 * http://www.ilovecolors.com.ar/detect-screen-size-css-style/

Concerning site navigation I suggest extending the sidebar all the way to the top of the page. This will let users see the current site navigation links easily. There will still be plenty of room for a large ad in the top space next to the sidebar. Wiki farms that allow the most choice will be the most popular in the end.