2 ms·
I'm pretty sure we should retain them, although they are not required as often. The problem is that beyond a certain width it becomes infeasible for the eye to
by matthewmacleod 12y ago
I'm pretty sure we should retain them, although they are not required as often.
The problem is that beyond a certain width it becomes infeasible for the eye to correctly jump back to the start of a line. There's some research on this, but I can't find it at the moment.
Smaller screens obviate the need for this, some of the time. But I've seen a lot of layouts which just compensate using white space - that fits with current design trends, but tends to mean I have a 27-inch monitor with a strip of content down the middle. It looks clean and minimal, but I suspect columnar text will come back into vogue at some point, and offer greater information density.
- j_jochem 12y agoHow is information density important on the web? Scrollable pixels are essentially free, as opposed to paper.
- matthewmacleod 12y agoYes, this can reduce the requirement for density, but it can be really annoying—as I described above—that I end up with a massive screen with loads of white space, having to scroll to view more content that could be comfortably presented.
- jahewson 12y agoI've seen this claim a lot, but nobody ever links to the research. Does it exist?
- phpnode 12y agoIt's trivial to do an experiment yourself, copy a load of text from a wikipedia article into a text file then open it in your browser, full screen. Depending on your display size you'll probably find it hard to read when line width exceeds roughly 90 chars
- thrill 12y agoPersonally, I have absolutely no problem reading wide screen text - all I need is about an em of white space on each side. Wish more sites offered that.
- matthewmacleod 12y agoYep, there's some information and citations here: http://www.usability.gov/get-involved/blog/2006/08/line-length-and-onscreen-reading.html http://www.usability.gov/get-involved/blog/2006/08/line-leng...
- return0 12y agoYes, i understand that, however one can constrain the width text of the text so that one doesn't have to , for example, move the head to read from side to side. However, columns are 2 dimensional, meaning that skimming back and forth between them requires more complex spatial processing than scrolling up-down.