With regards to line width, I don't understand 100% what you're saying. You agree that it is a problem, not because of aesthetics but because of readability. But then how do you propose to solve it? The only solutions are either increase font size (messing up things since now font size is tied to monitor width), or pad the sides with whitespace (what they're doing).
Increasing font size is magnification of the entire column, so you sacrifice the vertical space along with it. Line height can't go lower after a specific point - Arial for example, with font size of 12 points needs to have enough line-height of 16 points.
Again, increasing the font size is not the solution.
So left and right sides are unnecessarily wasted. The solution I am proposing is to use multiple columns. At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any. Columns are how Magazines do their layout of text. It is also part of the international style in graphics design.
Counter point: Magazines had to use columns to conserve space and page count. Each page adds cost. In digital media, we don't have such limits. The only down side is the user has to scroll a lot. But we have devised a scroll wheel and most users have this tool.
> At desktop size, you get 3 columns. At tablet size, 2. On the phones, its single column. There might be better solutions to this but I can't think of any.
This is makes it hard to handle flowing content. Do you add artificial pages to break up the content or does scrolling cascade up each of the columns?
Then there's the issue of typesetting being an NP hard problem. Even Word needs a lot of hand-holding when using multi-column layouts because it often produces poor results.
I don't necessarily mind the excessive whitespace when I'm reading, because I prefer to not have to move my head and eyes too while reading. But having a lot of content on the page at once, like you're proposing, is really beneficial in technical situations, where I need to move between different pieces of information, like taking notes.
Print media also doesn't have to deal with: resizable windows, accessibility, user styles, navigation, mixed media, comment sections, SEO, browser compatibility, load times, or security.
I understand we are just talking about page layout, but web designers still have to simultaneously contend with everything I've listed.
You mention a solution for 3 different sizes (desktop, tablet, and phone), but a responsive site often has to subdivide further. Even so, "tablet" does not have a standard size. Rotating a tablet/phone also changes the view size.
Size is not the only usability difference between desktop and mobile devices.
Columns in such a way would likely be hell in terms of accessibility (remember, the user can change the font size).
Of course, there are (potentially) ways to solve each of those, but they will depend heavily on the individual sites' and users' needs. This brings us right back to the issue of non-standard design across sites.
I wouldn't expect well-designed print media from a web designer any more than I would expect a well-designed site from a print professional. They are different professions and problem spaces that sometimes overlap.
Instead of disparaging all web designers as unprofessional morons, perhaps consider that they balanced all of the above along with your points and still landed on a different conclusion from you.
tl;dr the user can (rightfully) control a lot of factors in how they view the web that traditional print and graphic design do not have to deal with.
Somewhere between 80-110 cpl should be adequate to satisfy most deviations in sizes. This "buffer" factor can be accounted for when designing for resizeable interfaces. Column sizes don't have to be absolutely rigid and pixel perfect.
Scaling can be tackled by basing everything on em-units. Scaling using Ctrl + can effectively "zoom" the UI. The relationship between elements should stay the same.
None of this is difficult. We have tools to tackle these problems. Uninformed designers are the problem IMO, but I don't have data for this. My gut feeling is that most designers follow trends, UI frameworks (bootstrap, tailwind), and have stopped building CSS from scratch.
Why are columns hell for accessibility? Given the fluidity of 80-110 cpl, we should be able to account for any size from a phone to large displays. This is a solved problem.
Again, I am not saying there aren't challenges and may be there are better ways to handle all the variables. We should not throw the towel and not think, discuss and debate about it.
Personally (I would probably get shot by saying this) but responsive design is a real problem, it is not a feature, but its a bug - a horrible one.
By appeasing to many screen sizes, we create worse UI for all 3 sizes because no one really designs them for each size separately. Widths are in percentages, flex layout allos collapsable columns and the whole thing is not built from ground up. Either the designer starts with Desktop first and then mobile is a second thought (Bootstrap), or all class names are mobile first (Tachyons).
If we design UI from scratch for each of the 3 or 4 classes of screen sizes, it would be so much better. Completely, from scratch. Not taking the Desktop layout and collapsing the columns. But doing things like button sizes should be smaller for Desktop (mouse) and larger for mobile (finger). Not a single framework does this.
Overall, I agree it's a problem, but I see responsive design as a (perhaps poor) solution to the convergence of three more fundamental problems.
The first being screen size fragmentation. Most tablets fall into a similar size/scale category, so you can have buffers (kinda like how you were saying). However, there are still corner cases where (e.g.) a tablet in landscape mode happens to trigger a different size category. The fact that resolution helps in fingerprinting users is pretty indicative that fragmentation is a huge problem.
The second being the lack of a good way for a page to know exactly what type of device it's displayed on. There are hints/etc. to get close enough. However, it's still a fundamental truth of web development that the browser can always lie to you. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a design challenge regardless.
The third is less of a technical or even a design problem, but I personally think it's the worst. More and more, companies are making increasingly complex sites with no real thought to user implications. I believe this will always be true in a web where the real customers are ad companies and search engines and the user is the product.
On the lines of another point you've made, I'm not suggesting we give up; there are still plenty of ways we could and should improve designs and frameworks (you've outlined some really good ones).
