02.1 Overview
At its simplest, an Article is just a lump of text that can be formatted like a word-processing document with bold, italic, bullet points etc, and that can optionally contain one of more images. When formatting an articles, the biggest difference compared to a “normal” document is due to the nature of a web page compared to a piece of paper. A piece of paper has a known size so it is easy to set the margins and the body to specific dimensions, and specify the size of any images in terms of width, but with a web page one never can tell in advance how wide it is going to appear to the reader, since this is dependant on the screen size it is being read on, as well as the quirks of the chosen browser.
Joomla is clever enough to figure out what sort of device is being used, and configure the output to suit in the best way it can. For example, if looking a the web-site on a full-sized computer, there will be a menu across the whole width of the screen, the body of text will take up one column, and there will probably be another column to the right with additional information. In contrast, when looking at exactly the same page on a mobile phone, the menu will be squashed up to the top left hand corner, the text will fill the whole width of the screen and what would otherwise fill the right hand column will follow on at the bottom.
Sites created in WordPress share some of these advantages, but most bespoke websites created with other software do not. This lack of flexibility is the main reason they are being phased out.
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