In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
-Hendry Wadsworth
In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line.
I'm reading the parent, top-level comment on a Macbook Air with a 13 inch screen and the first line is a whopping 194 characters long. Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.
I agree that simplicity is a noble and useful goal, but when it comes at the expense of usability it's hard to swallow.
Such a cool-sounding job! Any fun stories to share from those days?
> Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.
Agreed. I always browse HN in a window that's half the width of my monitor.
There is something nice about the ultra-simplistic CSS that goes as wide as your window, though. Then, the user can just resize their window to find the sweet spot for themselves. The sites that force a fixed width for reading on everyone really miss the point, I think.
I have yet to experience anything even remotely close to the buzzing productivity of a newsroom minutes before the press deadline. Election nights were always fun because all the information was coming in later so we had to scramble. Obviously we knew about the time constraints beforehand so we could plan for it to the best of our ability, which of course usually fell to the curse of best laid plans.
I’m nostalgic for slower paced information flow and newspapers remain a near-perfect example.
But if I want to widen a fixed-with design, I can't.
So yeah, I'm with Wikipedia.
I just tried and Firefox' reader mode automatically limits the width, though unfortunately that's not made for interactive use. I guess it might be a good idea for a browser plugin (if it doesn't already exist), similar to the ones forcing dark color themes on websites using CSS.
...resize your browser window? The text is as wide as you want it to be.
On the other hand, I absolutely hate it when I want wider or narrower lines, and resizing the window either causes useless whitespace or a scrollbar to appear.
I have lots of tabs open, and every other site I use chooses a legible width.
You think I'm going to resize my browser window narrower every time I switch to HN, and resize it wider every time I switch to a different tab?
Sites are designed. Legibility is part of design. Appropriate characters per line is part of legibility. Full stop.
Not disagreeing with your premise BTW.
Or you could just put it in a separate window of the desired width; maybe then you'd even have enough space on your huge monitor to see several sites all at once!
As I wrote the post above, I had about a dozen different windows open, all of varying sizes. Monitors have gotten much bigger, yet the users seem to have gotten worse at making good use of that space.
(Nor do I have a huge monitor, I'm on a laptop...)
I think it's fair to add that links/menu items/buttons are generally too small and close to each other on touch devices.
More to the point, HN achieves simplity without going to an extreme where the user experience is negatively affected.
All links and buttons are freakishly small.
I approve!
The premature optimization here, is not trying skeumorphism again, because of a feeling.