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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Newspapers use columns for the same reason, to not get too wide lines. Unfortunately I don't think I've ever seen a site use columns, even though CSS supports it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/columns

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Columns like those are a bit awkward when combined with scrolling long blocks of text. When you reach the bottom of one column, do you need to scroll back up to get to the top of the next? Or do you have the column fit the height of the screen and have some sort of horizontal scrolling for as many columns as it takes.

Maybe they could do it the old-fashioned way and scroll the columns horizontally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#/media/File:G...

Why not limit the height of the columns so they fit on the screen, and wrap around to new columns lower down? So when you reach the end of the rightmost column, you scroll down the page and continue reading at the leftmost column.

I've experimented with this style on Wikipedia, with separate columns under each headline. It usually works well.

I think that shows that different mediums need different solutions and also different content.

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.

I've used it on my personal blog for many years at this point, because it is my personal blog and I can be weird with it, including using horizontal scrolling by default. https://blog.worldmaker.net

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.

Yes, they've been around forever, but browsers have never properly supported column breaks and orphan control. This tends to make any content with CSS columns unsightly, which is why no one uses them.

One browser did have amazing column break/orphan control: the IE11/Spartan (Edge Classic) renderer. It's amazing/sad how much the web regressed in CSS multi-column support rather than improved since then.

(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.)

Personally I find column-style layout to be more difficult on the web. Though probably just due to lack of familiarity.

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.

Just a quick note: It works on none widescreen desktop browsers as well if you zoom out far enough. Or at least it does on my 14" with FF 106

Columns that you have to scroll like that is not user friendly, their height needs to be limited to less than the window height.

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