4 ms·

Default styling looks terrible and is hard to read. Humans are good at reading columns at around roughly 80 characters, while browsers default to filling the wh

• screamingninja 4y ago
  > Humans are good at reading columns at around roughly 80 characters What makes you say that? Anecdotally, I prefer using the full width of my screen.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • danielvaughn 4y ago
    There is a huge amount of research devoted to this. Of course personal preferences exist, but there are physical constraints like the degree to which your eyes can move without turning your neck and other things. It’s somewhere between 60-120 I think, with 80 right in the sweet spot.
  • reaperducer 4y ago
    It's actually smaller than 80 characters. There has been over a century of research into this. It's why newspapers print their stories in columns, instead of across the entire page, which would be easier.
  • maweki 4y ago
    Newspapers have been using columns to break up long lines for well over a century. It's hard to find to the next line, if they are too long.
    • roelschroeven 4y ago
      And it's annoying to have to find the next line every few words if the lines are too short. Newspaper columns have always felt way too short for me. Most books have longer lines, and I much prefer that.
  • magnio 4y ago
    Just look at any physical book. I also wonder how many people would read Wikipedia more if they serve the mobile version on desktop.
  • kylebyproxy 4y ago
    Same, I lose my place every time moving from the bottom of a column to the top of the next.
  • sdenton4 4y ago
    Especially for long blocks of text or becomes easy to go to the wrong line when scanning back to the left side of the page. There exist decades of empirical research on this topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length
    • graftak 4y ago
      I can’t think of a source for this so take it as you wish but at some point in history it was attempted to mitigate this by changing the reading direction every other sentence so you’d be able to read in a continuous stream. It failed for obvious reasons.
      • sdenton4 4y ago
        Ancient-enough greek includes examples of left-to-right, right-to-left, and alternating line orientation, and may be what you're thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
  • mort96 4y ago
    Here's a literature review on the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234578707_Optimal_Line_Length_in_Reading--A_Literature_Review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234578707_Optimal_L.... The article content is inaccessible, but from the abstract: > Research has led to recommendations that line length should not exceed about 70 characters per line. The reason behind this finding is that both very short and very long lines slow down reading by interrupting the normal pattern of eye movements and movements throughout the text. And a document on the topic from the US government: https://www.usability.gov/get-involved/blog/2006/08/line-length-and-onscreen-reading.html https://www.usability.gov/get-involved/blog/2006/08/line-len... > The best available research suggests that users will read fastest if the line lengths are longer (up to 10 inches). If the line lengths are too short (e.g., two and a half inch columns), the line length probably will impede rapid reading. Users tend to prefer lines that are relatively short (about four inches). Wikipedia cites a whole bunch of studies on the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length): > Legibility research specific to digital text has shown that, like with printed text, line length can affect reading speed. If lines are too long it is difficult for the reader to quickly return to the start of the next line (saccade), whereas if lines are too short more scrolling or paging will be required. [...] One proposal advanced that, in order for on-screen text to have the best compromise between reading speed and comprehension, about 55 cpl should be used.[11] On the other hand, there have been studies indicating that digital text at 100 cpl can be read faster than text with lines of 25 characters, while retaining the same level of comprehension. There's a decent amount of variance, but common across all research in this area is that many hundreds of characters per line is never found to be the optimal length of a text column.
    • pronlover723 4y ago
      > (up to 10 inches) here on HN in my 16" MBP, 10 inches is ~230 characters
      • chipotle_coyote 4y ago
        The context from the linked article, which dates to 2006: > Her results showed that passages formatted in the longest line length (95 characters per line or 10 inches) resulted in the fastest reading speed.
• zvmaz 4y ago
  > Humans are good at reading columns at around roughly 80 characters Do you have some evidence backing this up? Thanks.
  • eslaught 4y ago
    This is the sort of thing you can Google, because it is extremely common advice. A few of the top hits: https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/text-typography/length-column-width https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/tex... https://pimpmytype.com/line-length-line-height/ https://pimpmytype.com/line-length-line-height/ https://material.io/design/typography/understanding-typography.html#readability https://material.io/design/typography/understanding-typograp... (see under Line Length) I don't have any studies at hand, but I think it's been pretty well established.
  • mort96 4y ago
    I collected a few links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972710 80 is somewhat arbitrary, I could've said 50 or 70 or even 100, but it's in the ballpark of what studies find. Studies never find 400 characters per line to be optimal.
• ravenstine 4y ago
  I much prefer the default styling other than that the margins are nearly nonexistent. Any time I come across a site that uses mostly default styling (such as some academic webpages from the 90s), I always think to myself "wow, this is pleasant to read." > Text also gets easier to read when more spaced out; the default line height makes the text too close together. The opposite is easily true in my experience. Making text large, using ample line height, and even greater spacing between paragraphs, makes for text that is more readable but makes the experience of reading much worse. This is of course entirely subjective unless someone comes up with measurable evidence, like a study on the sentiment of users. Something tells me that designers have been taking principles that are appropriate to hero page sections, advertisements, magazine covers and such, and applying them inappropriately to bodies of prose. Larger text with spacing and huge margins (or smaller max width) helps the reading impaired, but I don't really buy that people actually prefer it.
  • roelschroeven 4y ago
    I feel that large text with large line heights makes small pieces of text (maybe a couple paragraphs maximum) easier to read, but makes comprehension of a larger piece of text more difficult. It makes you loose overview of the larger structure. It's very well possible that it's all different for different people, but I much prefer having a larger piece of text in view; smaller font, smaller margins and smaller line height all help with that. Longer lines of text too. All within reason, of course. You know how books for children have ridiculously large fonts and spacing, in stark contrast with (most) books for grown ups? It seems there is a trend now to make websites look like the books I had when I was just a little kid. I don't like it.
    • ravenstine 4y ago
      I was just thinking; maybe large font size, wide margins, and bigger line height may serve to inflate "engagement" because they make it more difficult for a user to be able to glance at the majority of the page and get a sense of whether it's worth reading. If scrolling and getting a big picture view of an article takes some effort, users may be more likely to either read through the content or scroll slowly. Either way, it's a win for the designers because whatever tracker being employed will provide some fancy charts to convince the suits and ties that their work "increased engagement." It may also get users to look at more ads. All of which will certainly be pitched under the idea that it's accessible. I really hate this if that's true, because the net effect does seem to be that I have to spend more time on a page to determine if the content is garbage or not. With physical books, you could flip through pages and catch things you're interested in by glancing over large areas. The modern web, for whatever reason, is doing quite a bit to prevent that from being possible on our screens without hacking our own browsers to fix the mess.
• alerighi 4y ago
  > Humans are good at reading columns at around roughly 80 characters Depends. The reason why it may seem better to have narrow column is so you can skip ahead more easily and thus read faster (reason why newspaper divide an article into columns). Otherwise it doesn't make difference. To me it's absurd that this day the trend is to have wide screen displays (16:9 but nowadays even 21:9 is common) and then all the text is vertical in a column that makes it impossible to read. I prefer to give the use a choice: after all if the user prefers narrow text all he has to do is to take the mouse and resize the browser window at the width that he likes! But doing the opposite is not possible (at least without an extension that modifies CSS), and thus you have to keep scrolling something that otherwise would have fitted in a single screen.
  • mort96 4y ago
    The problem with your preferred solution is that it requires changing the window width for each web page. My web IRC client requires a somewhat wide window, since it has a sidebars of channels on the left and a sidebar of users on the right, both of which provide utility and I don't want to hide. Reddit is unreadable on narrow screens. But blogs would need an 80 column window (I.e 1/4 the width of the screen) to be comfortable, unless the blog has some sidebar which makes that too narrow. I don't know about you, but I switch between tabs frequently, and I'm extremely happy that I don't have to resize my browser for every tab switch. I keep my browser window maximised (usually on a secondary screen). I like that all web pages are more or less readable in that configuration.
• nottorp 4y ago
  > Humans are good at reading columns at around roughly 80 characters Are they, or is this a legacy of 80x25 text mode terminals?
  • mort96 4y ago
    Yes, they are. Links to studies here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972710 (Also, couldn't you have read the answers to one of the many other comments which ask the exact same thing?)
    • nottorp 4y ago
      They don't. They just mention the studies. I was wondering if it's linked to legacy terminals because ... ... i don't know what kind of books you read, but all the books I read have as much text as will fit on the width of the page. The only place i've seen thin columns was in technical books with introductory material. Never in fiction or advanced technical books.
      • mort96 4y ago
        I don't know what books you've read, but the ones I have read don't have pages which are 0.6 meters wide like my monitor. And paper newspapers, which come the closest of any medium I have used, use many columns per page to avoid ridiculous column widths. We can debate whether the optimal column width is closer to 50 characters or closer to 150 characters, but at almost 400 characters we're so far outside of what studies find comfortable that the discussion just becomes silly, IMO.