Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

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No, I am viewing it on a 24" screen. However I consider long lines of text as unreadable and my default size for a browser window is quite large. I really think most sites with simplistic CSS would include

    body { max-width: 11in; }

or something similar in their stylesheet.

Note that my own personal website conforms very well to his expectations (except loading images from flickr (without javascript) which, as you pointed out, leaks private data). I would add however that the most important thing is readability, responsiveness and speed.

A webpage without stylesheets is technically responsive, but in practice not very readable, due to pretty bad defaults in most browsers (i.e.: tiny fonts and cramped text)

Finally, the most important part of any article-based website (for me) is a full text RSS, which enables me to have actually good reading experience - outside of a web browser.

Is it not better to specify max-width in ems?

    body { max-width: 35em; }

That way, if the user makes the text very large, the entire width of the window will be used.

This probably depends on the browser but Safari, for example, scales inches (and centimetres) with the zoom level, so the result is probably the same. I don't like em and rem much as they do not really reflect the actual size in tangible units, but that is largely a personal preference.

What if the user changes the font size with CSS?

That is a valid point. Although I think that if you are modifying CSS then you either know exactly what you are doing, or disabling it altogether and replacing it with your own stylesheet. I think that there is quite a lot of stuff that will break if you increase the font size too much.

I'll play with it a little bit more, the ems might be a better solution after all.

don't specify max width in physical units, except for print. Specify them in either em or rem units.

My preference is ems for text width as that translates naturally to line length. Toss in an auto left an right margin for centered text and a padding directive for keeping text out of the gutters and you're a long way to readability.

You aren't alone in thinking that long lines reduce readability.

It's a fact proven out by years of practice in print.

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