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by IshKebab 1368 days ago
Because reading paragraphs of text with extremely long lines is really annoying. If the lines get too long it makes it hard to subconsciously find the next line when you scan back.

What's your solution? The only other option I can think of is multi-column newspaper style, but that's pretty fundamentally incompatible with the scrolling model of the web.

That's probably why you only see multi-column formats in page-based media like physical newspapers and PDF papers.
2 comments
wruza 1368 days ago
that's pretty fundamentally incompatible with the scrolling model of the web

It isn’t though. If browsers supported overflowing text into a “next” container (defined via hierarchy, selectors, whatever), designers could just design repeating pages of layouts like they usually do with full-height marketing stripes.

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IshKebab 1368 days ago
I'm not sure what you mean. The only way I can think it would feasibly work is if you have multiple columns with the same content, but offset by the window height. That wouldn't require any container linking and would allow you to scroll normally, but I also think it would be pretty weird.

Something like this: https://jsfiddle.net/n87hkdf4/

I think anything else would require tedious scrolling up and down all the time or worse - horizontal scrolling!

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wruza 1366 days ago
That offset would cut lines in half most of the times. Here is a visual diagram of one of examples of such layout:

  0vh
    margin
    column 1     column 2
    text         text
    text         text
    margin
  100vh
    margin
    column 3     …
    …
  200vh
Content flows naturally through column 1, 2, 3 and so on. No lines are cut in half horizontally (in a sense of overflow-y). When a window height resizes, content reflows accordingly - no scrolling required to read a full page at any window height.
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Arnavion 1368 days ago
>What's your solution?

I don't need solutions to problems I don't have.

If people find it hard to read long lines on my website they can make their browser window thinner. I don't feel compelled to impose my reading abilities (or lack thereof) on them.

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