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Comment by jimktrains2 | Hacker News Reader

> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? > Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts.

This really seems to be a problem with marketing and design people; we're not stuck with webfonts. We're stuck with unreasonable people.

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Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s.

As a profession, we can't complain that someone might be bothered by the idea of word-wrapping.

> Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s.

It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row. There's nothing wrong with that.

> It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row

Presumably, that's why they used 80 characters in the first place, as anything more is too hard to read.

Isn't it more so it is readable inside a phone display to an ssh session as well as a fat 4K screen? That's my reason at least. Can always scale up something, but line breaks I didn't make myself make me want to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of a demonic deity taking the earthly form of a little girl. Or, you know, angry.

132 column displays were common by the end of the 1970s.

80 column displays date back to the early 1970s.

I started coding on an 80 column display, and I have no doubt at all that a modern 16:9 monitor that can display a double page PDF or a web page with a variety of fonts is a much better display device.

It was 80 columns to match a punch card, AIUI, not a decision on readability grounds at all.

And why was a punch card 80 columns?

It sounds like that was the limit they could fit in the available space given the technology (earlier versions had fewer columns, the "upgrade" to 80 was based on using new narrower holes) - the width was set by wanting to match existing infrastructure for money.

Not only is 80char more readable, as a sibling comment said, but it also allows addition pieces of code to be displayed side-by-side on a laptop screen.

To be fair, 120char wide code is also not too bad for this purpose and readability.

I'm one of those people, though my reason is more so that I can fit more code windows side-by-side (especially on a system with a tiling window manager, like the laptop on which I'm typing this comment) and not have to deal with horizontal scrolling or weird word wrapping that's out of my control.

It also helps to keep my code readable; the shorter the line, the quicker I can work out what exactly that line happens to do. In the vast majority of cases, an inability to keep a line within 72 characters is a line that needs refactored.

I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to constantly be trying to understand where other people are coming from. They might not be so unreasonable; they just have different priorities than we do.

Our idea of what a webpage is might be a text document where the presentation is less important than the content. To others, the presentation IS the content. For some people, it might depend on what message the page is trying to convey.

Where you are wrong, I think, is that “the presentation IS the content” is a common belief among “designers” but almost never the belief of users.

That's not really true. They won't consciously believe that, but they won't use the technically superior product, if the competitor has the basics and a better design.

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