To quote pg, “The aim of web design is not to use all available screen space. It is legibility. Text is most legible with no more than 70 characters per line.”
I wonder why, then, HN comments don't adhere to that: .comment { max-width:1215px } in news.css here on my system, which feels very readable and reasonable at around 200 chr per line at 100% scaling. I also disagree with the 70 chr recommendation: with this article, literally the entire body is limited to a very small max width which takes up between a quarter to a third of the screen on two different computers I use at home. It's a distractingly bad experience to read, so much so that I went in and modified that CSS rule just to get through it. 1200 felt right and made it a much more visually pleasing square, rather than a thin column in a sea of stark gray.
There are actual standards for this, but they're more like recommendations, and ironically https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont... recommends "Width is no more than 80 characters or glyphs (40 if CJK)." while the first line of the paragraph explaining why is 112 characters wide and looks pretty much fine / comfortable to read on my screens.
1. pg is wrong. Text is perfectly legible to me even at 200 characters per line. Different people are different.
2. Since different people are different, it makes no sense to handicap everyone just because some people have a hard time reading text that is wider than a narrow column. Make the text fill most of the window, and that way people can have the window sized to whatever their comfort level is.
This trend of super narrow columns of text is making the web worse. It needs to die.
This seems fine on desktop. Besides phone users can be biggest whiners about not being able to read some blog, article etc as it is not phone optimized. So for better or worse (IMO worse) they have established primacy on how websites should be designed or configured.
