Personally, I think websites should fill up the available space, increasing font size if it makes sense, perhaps using resizing images. So, no - text should not be constrained to a maximum width. If width were a problem, billboards wouldn’t be a thing.
I guess not.
> there’s a difference between number of characters and width
Billboards use large letters to fill the space, but normally they would be readable on a business card.
You seem to suggest that fontsize should adapt to width to fill the space (seemingly to a billboard, as per your example).
If the billboard technique was used on the web, I guess we might not have more than a handful of lines on screen (on a 16:10 or so). That would disable skimming on long texts and even more, barely display a single paragraph (that's a gut guessing).
Plus, and more importantly, the distance to the screen is such that a font too big is not more readable. There's a tradeoff to he found for the fontsize that not only has to take into account the size of the screen but also the distance of the reader from the medium.
Or so I assume.
Billboards are meant to be read from far away. So even though the physical width is large, we perceive it to be much smaller. Maybe similar to a big banner on a Desktop monitor.
Imagine reading the billboard at a much closer distance, say 2 meter. You'll have to move your neck from left to right. It doesn't matter how big or small the font size is.
As a subjective test, I lowered the font size of a random article to see if I would have trouble reading it. Other than having to focus more to make out the text, I don't have problems reading the entire paragraph. On the other hand, removing the max width made it more uncomfortable to read.
So the distance from where the text will be viewed from is an important factor to take into account. Phones, Desktops & Banners all are viewed from different distances.
Newspapers don't have scrollbars. So they use columns.
This may be why phone-apps are so popular, their content is designed to be viewed only through the app.
CSS columns is cool, I didn't know about it. But not sure where I would use it either.
As one example, the "Golf with your Friends" subreddit always throws me for a loop due to its use of columns. I have no idea how to read it!
https://old.reddit.com/r/GWYF/
Note this example will only work on a widescreen desktop browser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#/media/File:G...
I've experimented with this style on Wikipedia, with separate columns under each headline. It usually works well.
(Some group or groups at Microsoft during Windows 8 development must have passionately loved multi-column text and proper "newspaper inspired" typography and wanted to see it succeed, and they did not seem to survive the backlash against Windows 8, sadly.)
I really love multi-column, and appreciate horizontal scrolling. I've got an ultrawide screen, and I love that my site is one of the very few that makes an interesting use of a screen that wide. (There are articles on my blog you can easily read with no scrolling at all.)
I've gotten so many complaints over the years about my use of multi-column, including here on HN. It seems a very polarizing thing, even as I wish it were more common. The one time one of my posts trended it got a lot of hate about my blog CSS. That was a revision ago, though. I've made a bunch of adjustments to it since then, because I did read all of them, and tried to find some tweaks (including a few bits of JS) to smooth the experience a bit.
Give me customization, not "alleged optimization" that turns out not to be so
Also, don't ask users to resize their browsers to accomodate for a site's poor UX. That's called "blaming the user."
9X% of web sites don’t do anything sophisticated, with columns or otherwise. They hard limit the content width regardless of the user’s window size, resulting in a tiny sliver of text.
Don't confuse your preferences with how far apart human eyes are. Your preference isn't relevant here.
I deliberately bought a giant high resolution monitor that I want to fully use. If I stretch my browser window full screen, I expect your web site’s content to expand to fit. I don’t care what some researcher thinks is “readable”.
I wish web developers would stop second guessing the user.
Do you have trouble reading HN in a maximized browser window on a wide screen monitor? I don't.
HN comments happen to be capped at 1215px (which I find too long on big comments), and comments usually have line breaks in between that make them not reach the max width.
> Text in books tends to take the full width of the page
Yes. Not the full width of both pages at the same time. Pages on a book have a vertical format, not horizontal. I guess columns would be somewhat ok on the web, but it's not really comfortable either... as we can scroll.
Coverage of the screen with text is the wrong metric regarding legibility.
If the text is too small I can hit Cmd - Plus but with those i have no recourse.