Talk:1917 New York City mayoral election

Formatting

Hi. I changed the formatting because the image on the left pushes the election results table off the right side of the page. Also, the "Later careers of the participants" section is squished into a tiny column. The "New Western Front" image is far too large and having it left-aligned effects the readability of the following paragraph and table. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 22:01, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much for responding, Chris. This is obviously (as I had feared) a difference between different screen sizes, type sizes and browsers. What works for me doesn't work for you, and (to a lesser extent) vice-versa, so we have to find some way to force the code so that most users can see something readable and at least moderately attractive. Some of the problems and considerations that guided the choices I made were:

1. I wanted to make the text in the cartoon (the poster, "Italian campaign", the calendar, etc.) readable, which is why I blew it up larger than I normally would have (my screen is only a 15 or 17-inch one).
2. The cartoon has an uneasy relationship with the "New York Elections" medallion hanging from the top right of the page. I left-aligned the cartoon so it wouldn't be squeezed by the Elections template, in turn squeezing the "General Election Results" subhead into the wrong corner.
3. Additional aesthetic considerations (as one of the help articles says) suggest having the Kaiser face into the article rather than away from the reader, and also favor balancing the page so that there's not just a disconnected bunch of things of different widths crowding the right-hand side. On my browser, screen and type size, the "Later careers" subsection is nicely parallel to the cartoon from top to bottom. But this arrangement causes havoc on your screen.
4. I added a few blank lines in order to have the General Elections and "Later careers" subhead start in what for me was the right place, but clearly this doesn't work for you.

There have to be some rough and ready ways of curing many of these conflicts, but I'm not sure what they are. Perhaps I need to put in a bunch of extra subheads. And obviously it's very valuable to learn what one might not otherwise know: how one's format actually appears on others' screens. [Perhaps we can swap JPG screenshots (not code), or put them our own personal talk pages to compare problems and solutions.] Best wishes, Shakescene (talk) 07:47, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I've made one change that should work across browsers. I've added a {{-}}, which does a <br clear="both"/>, before the election results section. The result has some whitespace for me, but at least should be legible for all browsers, window sizes and text sizes. This at least prevents the table from going off the page. Let me know how that looks for you. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 19:25, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I think your fix worked, Chris. I reduced the cartoon's thumbnail size to 400 pixels, which still keeps the most important internal words legible, and (after trying right-alignment) kept it left-aligned, but the previous problem of having the "General Election Results" title crawl up into the wrong corners doesn't reappear. I haven't tried playing with different type-sizes, but I did look at this in Internet Explorer and (both with and without sidebars of different widths) Mozilla Firefox and Netscape Navigator (available from http://www.OldVersion.com), and although there's some white space at the end of "Later careers", it generally seems to work. Shakescene (talk) 07:43, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

That looks better, thanks. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 12:26, 17 June 2008 (UTC)