It does, but it can be argued that this is not in response to a certain type of output file. ls(1) formats filename lists into columns depending on the width of the output viewport. It just so happens that it's not able to determine that width for anything but tty devices, so it falls back to the safe default "single column".

To use an analogy from web browsers, the equivaleny guideline would be asking websites not to detect features by reading the User-Agent, and using feature detection instead.