i don't understand the hassle around page width. first: there is no such concept of "page" in HTML. a web page is a document without specified dimensions by th

i don't understand the hassle around page width. first: there is no such concept of "page" in HTML. a web page is a document without specified dimensions by the original design of the web, not a "page" in a sense like pages in press-related applications (pdf, word processors, A4). so if you force any width to a DOM box, it'll be either too big or too small for someone (except if you know your target audience uniformely watches fullscreen browser on a 1900×1200px display - or i don't know whatever is the most popular screen resolution nowadays), and you can not reliably force min/max width in px without knowing what are the font sizes in the box, which is often unknown because the font renderer does not disclose it to the DOM renderer, let alone to the css author: remember it must be the user's free choice to set preferred font size for paragraph/headline/emphasizes, because you neither can uniformize all display and viewport size, user's eyesight, nor is it sensible to design your site for all possible viewport when the layout can be more reliably computed by the presentation application when the user's preferences are available. and secondly: can not users just resize the browser window to prevent long lines? it's one click-and-drag move. my point is: content authors should only decide on semantic design, not details (not specific color or size, or texture) ; and the reader should fill the specifics and present the document to the user according to his preferences.