Compare the legacy Wikipedia design with the new one. Limiting the line width makes it so much easier to read, cause you don't loose your place as often when you jump to the next line. This is especially infuriating to me, cause some languages still use the old design. I always loathe using German Wikipedia cause of this.
I agree that it can be bad when lines are excessively short, or when designers make no adjustments for desktop browsers.
It is hard to read text with very long lines. Have you tried it? You need multiple text columns if you want to use more horizontal space (newspapers and large books have been doing this for centuries for this reason).
Creating columns was quite tricky before the widespread browser support for the relevant css. There was at least a decade with widescreen monitors but without proper (and responsive) column support in browsers.
That being said: Pages that are newer than let’s say 2020 don’t have this excuse.
Do some sites contain really wide text that may need to be viewed on one line, like code?
Of course I’ve tried it. I’ve been on the internet longer than that design choice.
When my browser window is in an inconvenient shape or location, do you know what I do? I resize and move my browser window just like any other window.
There was a time in the past when some web designers would move your window to the middle of the page. That location makes it easy to read content. Does that mean users want the designers making that choice for them? No. And webpages don’t do that anymore.
Edit: just look at this disaster https://imgur.com/BfUcEVV 976 pixel margin in the left and the image is left aligned inside a centered 975 pixel div even though it is 2048 pixels wide and has plenty of space to be center aligned.
Lot of new apps, like for example Windows' Phone Connection, have a minimum width instead. With unhideable columns. Often chat programs that does this. Also annoying. And weird that they build apps to look like mobile first designs, but then refuse to be useful on PCs when I scale the window to a vertical rectangle.
Limiting horizontal element width. If I wanted to read at 600px wide, I'd make my fucking browser 700px or so wide.
Ok, so mobile "needs" it? Not my fucking problem.
Compare the legacy Wikipedia design with the new one. Limiting the line width makes it so much easier to read, cause you don't loose your place as often when you jump to the next line. This is especially infuriating to me, cause some languages still use the old design. I always loathe using German Wikipedia cause of this.
I agree that it can be bad when lines are excessively short, or when designers make no adjustments for desktop browsers.
Newspapers have text in short columns as well, it’s just way easier to read than text that covers the entire width of a huge page.
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It is hard to read text with very long lines. Have you tried it? You need multiple text columns if you want to use more horizontal space (newspapers and large books have been doing this for centuries for this reason).
Creating columns was quite tricky before the widespread browser support for the relevant css. There was at least a decade with widescreen monitors but without proper (and responsive) column support in browsers.
That being said: Pages that are newer than let’s say 2020 don’t have this excuse.
Do websites display more than text?
Do some sites contain really wide text that may need to be viewed on one line, like code?
Of course I’ve tried it. I’ve been on the internet longer than that design choice.
When my browser window is in an inconvenient shape or location, do you know what I do? I resize and move my browser window just like any other window.
There was a time in the past when some web designers would move your window to the middle of the page. That location makes it easy to read content. Does that mean users want the designers making that choice for them? No. And webpages don’t do that anymore.
Edit: just look at this disaster https://imgur.com/BfUcEVV 976 pixel margin in the left and the image is left aligned inside a centered 975 pixel div even though it is 2048 pixels wide and has plenty of space to be center aligned.
Fucking this.
My company does a SaaS SPA and it's hard coded to 800px for the main content panel, not for mobile purposes which has a different layout.
I have a 49" ultrawide, I guess I'll go fuck myself.
deleted by creator
Lot of new apps, like for example Windows' Phone Connection, have a minimum width instead. With unhideable columns. Often chat programs that does this. Also annoying. And weird that they build apps to look like mobile first designs, but then refuse to be useful on PCs when I scale the window to a vertical rectangle.