Comment by NobodyNada
3 days ago
A narrow column of text can make it easier to read individual sentences, but it does so by sacrificing vertical space, which makes it harder to skim a page for relevant content and makes it easier for me to lose track of my place since I can't see as much context, images, and headings on screen all at once. I also find it much harder to read text when the paragraphs form monotonous blocks spanning 10 lines of text rather than being irregularly shaped and covering 3-5 lines. I find Wikipedia articles much harder to read in "standard" mode compared to "wide" mode for this reason.
Different people process visual information differently, and people reading articles have different goals, different eyesight, and different hardware setups. And we already have a way for users to tell a website how wide they want its content to be: resizing their browser window. I set the width of my browser window based on how wide I want pages to be; and web designers who ignore this preference and impose unreadable narrow columns because they read about the "optimal" column width in some study or another infuriate me to no end. Optimal is not the same for everyone, and pretending otherwise is the antithesis of accessibility.
The user should have the choice. If I wanted my browser to display text in a tiny column on my monitor because I thought it would be easier to read, I would... resize my browser to be a tiny column on my monitor!
Why would shorter lines be regular? I use hn with `max-width: 60rem;`, and I get a ragged right (which I very much prefer over justification), while also getting a line length easier for my eyes to follow.
My eyes seem to navigate by paragraph more so than by line. It's hard to try to overanalyze how I read, but I think "corners" of a paragraph are landmarks that I latch onto, and when I reach the end of a line of text I don't scan back along the the line horizontally back to the left, I "jump" back, using the boundaries of the paragraph to estimate the start of the next line, and continue reading from there.
This means that I have a difficult time reading text with very large paragraphs. If a paragraph goes on for 10+ lines, I'll start to lose my place at the end of most lines. This is infuriating and drastically impairs my ability to read and comprehend the text.
It's interesting to me that you mention preferring a ragged right over justification, because I literally do not notice the difference. This suggests to me that we read in different ways -- perhaps you focus on the shape and boundaries of a line more than the shape of a paragraph. This makes intuitive sense to me as to why you would prefer narrower columns.
I don't think that I'm "right" for preferring wider columns or that you or anyone else are "wrong" for preferring narrower columns. I think it's just how my brain learned to process text.
I have pretty strong opinions on what's too wide of a column and what's too narrow of a column, so I won't fullscreen a browser window on anything larger than a laptop. Rather, I'll set it for a size that's comfortable for me. If some web designer decides "actually, your preferred text width is wrong, use mine instead" then I'm gonna be pretty annoyed, and I think rightfully so, because what those studies say is "optimal" for the average person is nigh unreadable for me. (Daring Fireball is the worst offender I can think of off the top of my head. I also find desktop Wikipedia's default view pretty hard to read, but the toggleable "wide" mode is excellent).
One of my pet peeves is single line paragraphs.
It's like you have to take a breath after reading one paragraph.
But the paragraph was just one sentence.
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"Justified", I suppose, just looks nicer in smaller width columns, like in a newspaper where there might be four columns on one page. "Ragged right" prevents a 'natural' line on the right side of the column, somewhat diffusing the bounding box of the column. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see another view on reading, where the parent commenter prefers wider rather than more narrow columns. I usually lose track on a line level, rather than paragraph level, when the column is too wide.
This also reminds me of an internal diff tool that showed changes with a red (removed) and green (added) coloured backgrond. At some point a colleague pointed out that they could not see the difference between those backgrounds! An eye-opener, if you will, in terms of accessibility that requires adding other, non-coloured, elements indicating the semantic meaning of those background colours.
Interesting; never considered anchoring on the paragraph boundaries. I suspect you are right in that I use line shapes to navigate, as I also treat capitals as landmarks to bounce around. Once had a visual migraine where I could only detect the current line (above and below just didn't exist), and it forced my reading speed to a crawl.
Naturally. Centuries of typography as a field and your anecdote obliterates it.
Centuries of typography during the age of print. Screens have continuously changed (resolution, refresh rate, size, reflectance, color reproduction, black levels, etc.) over the past 30 years and it's not guaranteed that conventions from print make sense for the current mix of screens.
But we have remained largely the same. And I don't see how colour accuracy affects how many words per line most humans can comfortably deal with.
This whole discussion is silly and rooted in ostensibly clever people who have mastered something unnecessary hard and have now tied their identity to that mastery.
Power users what their tools to be shit. Sure.