| The 72 (or 80) column standard is one that is guaranteed to be accessible in virtually any circumstances. Such as, say, just for the sake of argument, when you've been awakened at 2 am by a pager, have travelled an hour to the colo, have a multi-switch KVM wired to a cabinet of otherwise headless boxen, several of which are embedded / dedicated devices with no package installation or updates possible, several of which support only serial terminal access (possibly given an equivalent access over TCP/IP or USB), and for which the output standard is an 80x24 terminal. This might include ILOM, IPMI, or similar protocols. There's too much RF in the colo itself to make a phone call, let alone support wireless or mobile data. In such a circumstance, relying on anything but 7-bit ASCII text becomes really dicey. Unicode has over 144,000 characters presently supported with more being added constantly. Systems without ongoing OS support (such as the six year old Android tablet I'm typing this on) simply won't have the new hawtness^Wcuteness installed, and I'll be looking at some variant of ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯. Which in context won't be especially useful. Documentation in MS Word, DOCX, PDF, PS, or ePub will be simmilarly opaque. Documentation in strict HTML ... without dependencies on images, CSS, or JS, may be useful, if I can aim w3m or lynx at it. (And I can always simply view the source.) Documentation, like lifeboats, fire-extinguishers, and aircraft emergency slides, is intended for use in the least favourable, not most favourable conditions. Your high-powered, graphical, UTF-8 / Unicode lastest-motherlovin-codeset Retina-display monitor should have no issues in taking 72-character-wrapped text and unfolding it to longer line lengths. That 15 year old bit of embedded kit corporate's been too fucking cheap to replace or swap out when the universe is melting down, not so much. |