Almost all screens are far too wide for a single column of text. Most publishers with long-form text currently opt for a fixed maximum width. Considering the m

Almost all screens are far too wide for a single column of text. Most publishers with long-form text currently opt for a fixed maximum width. Considering the magazine standard is and has long been columns, it's not implausible to consider this a result of the limitations of HTML and CSS. Until fairly recently (and I'm not sure about support across all browsers even today), multi-column layouts were almost impossible, at least without all sorts of crutches and JS. Or maybe multi-column layout was/is a crutch for printed media, where a 5:32 ratio would be rather impractical to handle on a moving subway? Either way, the standard of about 60-character column widths is almost definitely the most ergonomical. And at that width hyphenation is quite useful.