Reintroduce maximum width of inner content

[m-vo]

Affected version(s)

5.0-RC1

Description

Using the Contao BE full screen on a large monitor unfortunately got very cumbersome to work with:

waytoowide.webm

Especially if you use multiple tabs in a browser window, resizing the browser window each time for one tab is not practical. I did not find any other web application that I'm using to behave this way.

As long as our back end is structured like it is now (namely: not making use of the horizontal space), I'd like to vote for reintroducing a fixed maximum width. This does not do any harm for smaller viewports but improves the usability for bigger ones.

Here are some references:

• Question: What is the best max-width container in a website?
• Post about visual clutter and why you would use negative space
• Paper about optimal line length in reading (spoiler alert: <=70 chars)

[leofeyer]

See #4371 (comment)

[fritzmg]

See #4371 (comment)

This does not answer the comments above and neither does this address the comments from here.

[bytehead]

I cannot leave this uncommented as #4371 (comment) IMHO is not a valid reason for the decision made.

[ausi]

Maybe the best of both worlds combined by giving the user the choice to resize the content area?

Bildschirmaufnahme.2022-08-06.um.13.51.23.mov

(this is just a POC, real implementation would have to look different)

[asaage]

I like the resizable content area and the fact, that it's a quickly adjustable user-specific width. But that would probably cause issues with mobile devices. You then need to store the width client-side (local or session storage) etc..
If there is no way back to the fullwidth-checkbox in the user-profile (which i think was a good solution) i'd definitely prefer the resizable aproach over the "adjust your browser-window" advice.
My browserwindow is pretty much always 2560x1080 due to numerous tabs wich is "waytoowide" for contao's interface.

[fritzmg]

@ausi expanding on that, we could even make the left column resizable (as seen in your example it might be benefitial to have more space there depending on the menu items in individual Contao instances - especially ones with terminal42/contao-leads where the title of a Form could sometimes be too long for the main menu).

But that would probably cause issues with mobile devices. You then need to store the width client-side (local or session storage) etc..

That's not an issue though.

[Aybee]

The best thing I would find is a per user option to turn on fullwidth and otherwise set a max-width of say 1440px.