Browsers still ship the bad defaults because changing defaults would break existing websites.
> 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.
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.
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.
What makes you say that? Anecdotally, I prefer using the full width of my screen.
> 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-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):
> 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.
here on HN in my 16" MBP, 10 inches is ~230 characters
> Her results showed that passages formatted in the longest line length (95 characters per line or 10 inches) resulted in the fastest reading speed.
There exist decades of empirical research on this topic.
It's hard to find to the next line, if they are too long.
Newspaper columns have always felt way too short for me. Most books have longer lines, and I much prefer that.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have some evidence backing this up? Thanks.
https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/tex...
https://pimpmytype.com/line-length-line-height/
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.
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.
Are they, or is this a legacy of 80x25 text mode terminals?
(Also, couldn't you have read the answers to one of the many other comments which ask the exact same thing?)
... 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.