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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> Have you ever tried to read Wikipedia on a very large screen? It looks like this: [image] Those paragraphs are so wide! Wikipedia doesn't constrain the container width at all. This leads to lines that are hundreds of characters in length.

NOOOOO! Please, please, please, please stop second-guessing my choice of browser window width! I bought a nice 27" monitor, and maybe I just want to use the whole thing. Why is your opinion about the amount of space I should be able to use for text more important than mine? I honestly don't care what your research says about optimal character lengths. I deliberately stretched my browser window to be this wide. Please don't override me.

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Two reasons. One, the designer of the site has a specific UX and UI in mind, and that is their decision. If you don't like it, you can hack it with local CSS or just use a different site.

Two, (I know you don't care, but for others reading) there are studies that show that for the vast majority of people, width constraints make it easier to read. So there is good reason to enforce those constraints in the design from a usability perspective, not just a design perspective.

Sorry you don't care about the research. When I'm building a site I absolutely DO care about the research, and what will make it work the best for the largest number of people.

Have you read the research? It doesn't really support the claims people make about it. A good starter thread (albeit it's hard to follow all the replies in the nested conversations): https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1115707741102727168

I've read quite a bit of it. It really depends on the claim. Speed is generally faster with longer lines, although it does seem like there is an upper limit. But comprehension and subjective judgement (yes, that last is hard to quantify) seem to be best between 40-60 characters (actually less than the commonly recommended 65 as seen in the original post here). Also, it's generally not line-length, but characters per line, that matters, and keeping the visual angle from changing as the user reads.

So it depends on what exactly is being measured, which is why I said the overall UX and not something more specific.

This is a bit older, well prior to the days of 4K displays, but lots of interesting stuff nonetheless: http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060729105544/psychol...

Optimal line length for the web is not as short as it is commonly believed: https://www.viget.com/articles/the-line-length-misconception...

Even apart from that, I just see no point in constraining the widths forcefully. Just let the width adapt to the browser width, then each user can size it to his/her preferences and needs of the moment. Win-win for everyone.

I guess my rant should be more directed towards browsers. I remember Netscape allowing me to specify all sorts of stylistic preferences. Hell, I could easily make your web site's background be a brick wall if I wanted to. Most those things have kind of disappeared by now, and we're left with CSS hacks, "Disable CSS" and "Reader Mode". Oh and I guess we can set default fonts and colors too, but those just get over-ridden by 99% of sites. Would be nice if User-agents would return some more control back to the actual user.

Yah, I definitely miss the days of providing your own user style sheet without plugins or other addons. These days I don't hardly bother, although I will pop open the dev tools to "fix" something once in a while if it's really bad.

The people of number two can resize their browser window. If I prefer full width lines I'm forced to the designers specific UX. That's quite ironic because the U in UX stands for user and my eXperience with such sites is horrible. Worst of all are those that have code examples that go beyond the column width but don't wrap, so I have to scroll horizontally even though two thirds of the page are empty.

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