Week 6: Ordinatio and Compilatio

This question (as with all questions) immediately made me think "but what if we look at medieval manuscripts??" Shocking, I know.

So today I am looking at the idea of the "Golden Ratio" of the page and whether we can apply it to webpages. Malcolm Parkes has discussed the concepts of ordinatio and compilatio in regards to the page, pointing out that the changes in medieval scholarship practices, i.e. commenting on Bible passages instead of just copying them out, fundamentally changed the way the page looked and functioned, leaving a large amount of space at the outer edge (away from the gutter) and at the bottom of the page for commentary.

At left is a page with the margins left clean, at right is one where they have been used for annotation:

Parisan Bible, on Vellum

Boniface VIII, Liber sextus decretalium, with commentary
of Johannes Andre, c.1325.

This has in turn influenced what every page of the modern print book looks like--pull open a conventional book that you have near you--you'll see that it's the same. Our eyes are trained to find this layout very easy to read, and it allows the reader to insert themselves into the page--whether that be through annotation or illustration. Either way, this margin is left there to be USED. (And sorry, Ben and Laura, I still don't think that white space is oppressive--it's an opportunity and always has been!)

However, do websites have this golden ratio? Natasha talked earlier about how three column pages are very standard, and discussed the idea of headers and footers, but how about something even earlier? I'd argue that many pages follow this idea. Even this blogger interface has a right side margin for settings--see here:

This exact page, as I'm writing it. Meta, right?

That left-hand margin is separate from your text--it is for you, the creator, to fiddle with (even if it is post settings.)

Older websites still have this margin as well: check out this screenshot from the Princeton Charette project--a functional, if not very pretty website--the white space is still there.

Princeton Charrette Project, available here. Kindly ignore my tabs, I captured them
in order to give you a sense of scale for the white space, which looks very medieval to me!

I think that this is an old fashioned relic of the physical page though--as we are borrowing from the completely different medium of the Smart Phone OS and the app interface, webpages become more like scrapbooks than actual books--the margins disappear. 

This screenshot from Google Play Music (RIP, Spotify, you glorious thing) shows the "new" style of site:

WHERE ARE MY MARGINS? WHERE IS MY CREATIVE MEDIUM?
PANIC!

So what's my point in the end? I guess there is no golden ratio for webpages. I think, however, this reflection has shown me that web "pages" frequently seem derivative to me. I am not sure there's a web-native "Golden Ratio" that hasn't been adapted from the book or from the newer mobile OS technology. 

I'll flip the question to you, fellow readers: is there a native webpage format? Is it Natasha's 3-column? Or is it something completely different?