We could also all go back to 800x600 monitors. That way, no one would have to be subjected to writing the 10 lines of css to make text heavy sites more readable ;)
No, because then you'd have a short line of text that takes up a huge amount of space.
Your lines of text on the screen should never be much wider than your hand at arm's length, ever, for any reason. Not even if it's an example of a one-liner in bash - wrap that line to make it easier to read.
Don't believe me? Angrily click <reply> on this post to tell me what an idiot I am, start to type your reply, and then hold your hand up palm out at arm's length to the screen so it covers up the text box you're typing in.
Decades of research show that long line lengths cause people to read more slowly, although it is of course possible that you process text differently than most.
"Ridiculously" short is another matter, but by my count, "significantly wider than your hand at arm's length" means well above 20 words per line.
When writing outside of a terminal, I wrap single-line shell commands with backslashes and space indentation. The breaks are at logical clauses, as if writing a conventional programming language. I find this much more readable than the alternatives. Often my terminal will also get it this way, from a copy-paste.
If I have to do it twice I stick it in a proper script, with some comments, so I remember what it all does next time I go to do it. I do this particularly for stuff like complex ffmpeg filter chains where I need to do a lot of stuff to a video file. By simply running the bash script, at some later date I can get it to remind me what it does, and suitably mangle the video file.
Then, later on, often weeks later, I use command history to scroll back through everything I've typed until I find something that looks vaguely like what I originally typed, or I don't find it and figure it all out from scratch again, having totally forgotten about the bash script I wrote.
Yeah, but how many times do you see a one-liner that's in a nice little boxout, but there's a scrollbar and you need to slide it backwards and forwards to read the whole thing?
> we would just keep our browser windows at a smaller size
I wouldn't keep a browser at all, I would just read them in Emacs all the time or from the command line. I would also be able to use my preferred visual theme with the entire web, and not have to look at some really nasty web designs from time to time, albeit I do agree that as a game dev (long time ago) I do like when I see pretty graphic design.
However, I am not sure how my bank will do and all the other web services in just plain text. Perhaps it is possible, perhaps not?
I think the trick is to avoid the hr tag and to center the pages. I run a no css website https://www.pilledtexts.com/ and just have the readable content in .txt files where I can add a max width.
Which is pretty bad on mobile, because the lines wrap before the hard line endings, making a long-line/short-line repeating cadence which I find really difficult to read.
Unironically, somewhere between 1080 and 2K scaling is probably all anyone will ever need since humans can't focus on more real estate than that. The higher-res monitors all scale the UI to that.
What do you mean? It perfectly adapts to any browser width; if you want to resize it, just resize the browser window. It's perfectly readable on both a 4k screen and a small phone.
The alternative is the "accessible" mush which is common nowadays - no matter how big your screen is, the content is compressed together into a small strip in the middle of the screen, almost like a phone.
No thanks, I'll take fullwidth content anytime over that....
Making text wider is lazy. At some point, you'll need to break it into columns so that the text is readable. Perhaps on super wide screens, three or four columns (akin to a two column book that's wide open or a newspaper) may even be more preferable.
Otherwise, the other option is to scale up thr text size, but that takes up precious vertical space on wide screens, and doesn't increase information density.
Obviously, text columns may only make sense it certain scenarios - a minimum amount of text might be required to justify a second column as opposed to just limiting the width of the first column.
But why does that matter for reading it? It's just reading left to right either way. The submission was fine for me to read, and so is HN which has pretty thin margins by modern standards.
Ah, never mind. I understood it the wrong way around. So you have a big resolution and want shorter lines.
Maybe use reader mode which applies some css. I still like this for content centric websites. My favorite blog also works like this for years
I dunno guys, I kind of like CSS.