I wanted to make a simple, fast loading site to put essays on. I thought, "Surely modern browsers render html 5 with these fancy new article tags on any device in a readable format, right?"

Nope. Not at all. Shockingly bad.

"But at least there's a CSS way to limit paragraph width to a reasonable number of words or letters that works on any device and that degrades gracefully without resorting to Javascript, right?"

No again.

LaTeX does this exact thing and has for years. Why is this so damn hard?