Nick Bastin

I generally abhor wasted space on web pages, but some situations are less of a problem than others. As with all things, you should consider your audience. For example, if you’re the Mozilla wiki, you probably ought to consider that your users are likely reading your pages while trying to do something else on their computer, and you should be as considerate as possible when consuming their screen real estate.

It’s not that I mind a wiki-wide table of contents (although when compounded with an article-wide table of contents, it does seem a bit ridiculously placed):

It’s that you’ve now created a huge margin of wasted space below that table of contents:

And the wiki is designed such that the margin is fixed regardless of the width of the page:

Resulting in a workflow where I can only make the content smaller and small on the page in an effort to also see my terminal window, instead of eliding the (now-giant) margin.

Let this serve as a lesson to future authors of websites tailored towards software users and developers – your users are probably trying to use their computer while reading your content.