[ryandrake]

Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen.

1: https://daringfireball.net

[rhines]

While it is wasteful, I think the readability gain is far from nebulous. If you look at newspapers, they break pages up into columns. If books exceed a certain width, they get broken down into columns. Journals often break their articles into columns.

Now, a fair follow-up to this is that why don't we make text on the web into columns, so instead of big sidebars of white space you fit multiple columns of text on the screen? I'd say this is probably because the web uses scrolling instead of pagination. If there's more text than can fit on the page, it's faster and easier to just scroll down than it is to load a new page. But if you have a layout with columns, you'd have to scroll down to read, then scroll back to the top each time you finish a column, which is a hassle. So just having one long column requires the least user effort.

All said, of course some people might have different preferences. I'm sure some people find it easier looking from side to side with full screen text than scrolling down, or easier to click a next page button than scrolling down. But I think the trend for fixed width single columns on the web is one that's meeting many if not most peoples' preferences.

[Wowfunhappy]

I took several graphic design classes in college, and the rule burned into my brain is "between 8 and 13 words per line" for maximum readability. This was a guideline for print, but I do think it matters on the web as well, and it's very easy to exceed!

[opensmtpd]

I agree. For this reason, I frequently invoke reader mode on the browser when reading wikipedia articles in full screen. It is much easier to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length

[dvdkon]

I find it much worse that so many sites nowadays expect users to have their browsers maximised. Noticed how most books aren't wider than an A5, and how any publications wider than this use relatively narrow columns? Because reasonably narrow text is easier to read.

[Wowfunhappy]

My question is why so many users keep their browsers maximized! I bought a wider monitor so I could comfortably have multiple windows open at once.

And by "wider" I mean from 1024x768 to 1080p, and by "bought" I mean "bought a decade ago".

[dvdkon]

Because once one site starts needing X px, most users will just keep their browser at least X px wide. At some point X became so close to the monitor's resolution that not maximising the window is just extra work. I'm not happy about having to maximise my browser, but I would be less happy about having to scroll horizontally.

There are definitely some people who just maximise everything out of habit, but I don't think there are enough to have created this trend of ultra-wide webpages.

Thankfully modern webpages being responsive at least somewhat fixes this issue, even if many sites still manage to screw this up.

[Wowfunhappy]

No, I actually don't think websites have much of a problem with this. I generally keep my browser around 1,000 pixels wide (more or less depending on what I"m doing), and websites generally work fine. Responsive design helps a lot, as you say.

What surprises me is how many users seem to keep their browsers maximized at all times, particularly on desktop-sized displays! I'm pretty sure I see people doing it more on Windows than on Mac for some reason, which makes me wonder if it's a UI design problem (of the OS, not websites).

[dvdkon]

Interesting. A number of websites don't display correctly for me if I use just half of my 1920 horizontal pixels. Keep in mind that many users still use 1366x768 or similar screens.

As for maximising, Mac OS X never had a conventional one-click maximise button, the green button originally did something like resize the window to an optimal size (IIRC), and now it makes the app fullscreen on a separate "virtual desktop" of sorts. It might well be a habit from the times Windows didn't have Aero Snap.

[mtrower]

> the green button originally did something like resize the window to an optimal size (IIRC)

Indeed, it's called "zoom". Fabulous when it works correctly, and one of my favorite features. You can still get at it with Option-Click (on the green), when the application supports it (not all do). Double-click on titlebar might also work, but I can't really check atm.

[GoblinSlayer]

I do it only for pdf, because pdf is written in small text and the only way to fix it is to zoom the entire thing, but it can't reflow text and zooms like a picture, but browser just reflows text according to its size.

[tpxl]

Because window managers. Windows 7 and before definitely didn't make it obvious how to make a window half a screen, Windows 10 makes it a bit more obvious I think, but you're still limited to 2 windows side by side. Ubuntu's default window manager has the same behaviour as W7 and Lubuntu's doesn't have keybindings for this by default at all.

You can of course resize windows manually but it's tedious compared to a 2 button shortcut, especially having to hunt the 3 pixel wide resize button with wrist issues.

[wffurr]

If only it was simple to configure my user agent to act as my agent and format things readably. I prefer moderate line widths. Even at half-screen on my 29" widescreen monitor, unformatted text is too wide.

[ryandrake]

Yes, this would be the best. Web site provides the content and the browser (user agent) decides how best to render it, potentially different than how the web developer would want it.

[TeMPOraL]

And that was the original goal. Sadly, the marketing people won and turned the web into a glorified magazine delivery service.

Remember when browsers supported user styles out of the box and put them in a somewhat discoverable location?

[SquareWheel]

I remember users setting their default font sizes to 30px, then complaining when they hit the one piece of text on a website with an undefined text size.

User-defined formatting hasn't worked since CSS was introduced.

[GoblinSlayer]

Works for me much better than CSS. HN sets font size to 10pt, any user setting is better than that.

[GoblinSlayer]

Line width is approximately equal to browser window width, so you can adjust the line width by resizing the browser window.

[12ian34]

I used to think this, but after really trying to assess the difference in some examples I made myself, I was converted.

Have you seriously tried yourself to read two identical blocks of text, one at full screen width (I tested 100% zoom Wikipedia on a 1440p, 27" screen at standard DPI) and one at a width of about 55 characters on the same screen? Have a go.

I find it easier to locate the next line after finishing one, which gives me a quicker reading speed.

[GoblinSlayer]

Tried to read PDF with text formatted in 3 thin columns per page, it's absolutely unreadable.

[callmeal]

There's two ways of reading - scrolling your eyes from side to side, then down, or just scrolling down with your eyes (no side-to-side).

Smaller widths make it easier for the "read the whole line in one glance" readers and is I think the main reason for this confusion.

Sometimes I like just glancing down a page and getting the gist of the screen. Other times I prefer to let my eyes do extra work and read denser text.

[GoblinSlayer]

Short lines can't be read in one glance, they are too short to be meaningful, so when you see it in one glance, you get no information from it. The worst case is when the line stops in the middle of a word, now you can't even see individual words in one glance.

[mtrower]

It’s about the distance your eyes need to travel back to find the next line, and the angle at which they need to do so.