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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width.

For what it’s worth, the author would not consider this a bug. He does it (as I understand) because he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.

Which brings us to one of the earlier claims

"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week"

which should be rewritten as

"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of things that I consider to be bugs per week"

which is to say that the "bug" is in the eye of the beholder. It seems the author stretches the definition of "bug" to include cases where something functions, but in a manner that is open to improvement or not to his taste.

  > he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.

whats the reason for that?

It's less readable for me, never heard of any research. Whatever, there's reader mode.

To say nothing of this bit of markup, which actually raises an exception in the browser:

`<link rel="icon" href="data:;base64,=">`

Curiously, this makes Firefox display the default favicon (instead of no favicon):

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/raw/refs/heads/ma...

I had this same discussion on another HN thread a while back. I prefer lines to run as long as possible; I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I have to believe I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.

Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which may only be optimum for a percentage of users or use cases, which may not include me), the user can simply make their browser whatever width they prefer the lines to wrap at. This way, everybody gets to choose what works for them.

> I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds.

You must find it difficult to read books, magazines, newspapers, as all of them have short lines

I am in the same boat as GP, and I wonder if it's one of the reasons I migrated hard to ebooks and online magazines/newspapers as soon as that became possible and never looked back.

The bad text formatting in printed works (including the bizarre decision to sacrifice useful vertical position cues ("ragged right") to imitate the technique medieval scribes used to reassure their patrons they weren't wasting valuable parchment ("full justification")) is a big reason why I avoid them whenever possible.

I'm in the same boat as kmoser. I don't like narrow text lines either.

In my experience, books are mostly OK, as long as they don't split up the text in columns. Magazines and newspapers often do have columns that are much narrower than I would like.

To some degree, yes. Not to the point that I can't or won't do it, but I would certainly prefer books to be printed much wider. I can mitigate some of the issue by keeping my index finger along the left margin as I read, so I have a better idea of where my eyes need to jump to the next line. That technique is impossible with my computer screen, which is more than arm's length from me.

Part of the issue is that I read fairly quickly, so I find myself spending a relatively large percentage of my time skipping to the next line, and it's that frequent context switching that is annoying.

Making the browser windows narrow is a bad suggestion. Because most websites have some sort of navigation bar on the left and another bar on the right, so we need a wide enough window to get enough of the main text (width).

There are very few websites without those columns.

Surely between the browser window too wide (where the text lines are too long) and the browser window too narrow (where side bars are hidden) there exists a width that is exactly to your liking.

The point is that most websites have sidebars, but this one doesn't.

Let's say my preferred text width is 10 units. Due to sidebars, most websites require a browser window width of 20 units to show me 10 units of main text.

Then I visit this person's website and get text 20 units wide and it's very uncomfortable to read.

The text width I like doesn't change but the browser window width I need does change, and I don't want to change it when navigating around, to be honest.

I guess I could use the browser functionality to inject my own CSS rules for specific websites, then I could change the single-column no-max-width websites to show me a sensible text width.

But I also suppose that I'm not alone with this preference. I believe there have been studies about a suitable line length that is easy to read, and this is reflected in printed media. So those websites ask everyone to make such changes. That doesn't seem right.

Someone always complains about that when a danluu link is posted.

Every time I have to go back to the article (usually after having already read most of it) and notice "yes, it's using the whole browser window".

I think you can obtain the common experience of one sentence per screen and lots of scrolling by pressing ctrl/cmd and plus a couple times.

> Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width

Are you maximizing your browser’s windows?

I do - I much prefer using computers with only one window visible. And use all the keyboard shortcuts (tab, window and desktop switching) to rapidly change what the thing it shows is.

I reckon there's something interesting about human variety in focus and/or visual processing this tells!

I, on the other hand, use the keyboard shortcuts to adjust the browser width to achieve the desired line width and line start, because even when the web page takes care to set these, it varies from site to site and rarely is what I want. (For sites I visit often, I use window manager automation to auto-adjust the browser window size.)

No. I keep my browser to about half of my 27" 4k monitor.

Thank god for Reading Mode in browsers...

By that token every CSS1 page is bugged.

I don't see that as a code-bug but a difference in implied requirements. Namely, the expectation about which person can/should choose the width of the lines everyone had to read.

Let's flip it around: Suppose someone put in code/markup to prevent any viewer from picking a larger or smaller font-size. Would that be "just fixing a bug", or would some of us be pissed that the author has dictated something in a way which infringes on our autonomy and disrespects our superior-knowledge about what constitutes our good reading experience?

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