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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

The article addresses this by mentioning that they referenced research demonstrating text that is too wide causes people to read less comfortably and retain less information.

The page gets much less padded when you reduce the size of the window, because the padding isn't there to make blank space, it's there to enforce a maximum line width.

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> text that is too wide causes people to read less comfortably and retain less information.

This seems like an excuse to force JS to enable ads & what should be the default that is toggled with the fullscreen button in the bottom right. It does not justify wasted width as the user can more easily set the text to the appropriate zoom than applying some custom CSS:

  .mw-page-container {
    max-width: none !important;
  }
  .mw-content-container {
    max-width: none !important;
  }

Zooming in now decreases the padding on the right, but has an offsetting increase in the wasted padding on the left contents until it completely disappears with huge text.

> This seems like an excuse to force JS to enable ads

No, it's an accurate description of most users' reading preferences, myself included.

You're seriously expecting Wikipedia users to set up custom css to apply their reading preferences, just so that you personally don't have to deal with a different amount of padding?

Do you realize the level of entitlement and absurdity here?

One of the two options has to be chosen for the no JS, no query param / no login default - there is no entitlement and absurdity in that expectation. Using the max-width: none or similar as the default option has the benefit of allowing the user's browser keep the ability to monotonely scale the text density along with size using zoom as the displayed area would be nearly constant. It's rather arrogant & condescending to choose for a user a width that overrides what control they have with their window's dimensions, screen size, viewing distance & vision capability.

I can zoom in on current wikipedia just fine using browser "zoom in", and the size of the column of text increases accordingly.

I don't understand the nature of your suggested link between ideas about maximum comfortable text column width are related to forcing JS. The size of the text column is generally set with CSS and not JS, no?

Ideally, CSS and not JS would be used to set the size of column text. But, that is not what Wikipedia is doing by default. Observe the behavior of the table on this page with & without JS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_relation that occurs on not just that page, but all of the Binary relation pages. Note the dangling "in" at the top without JS with limited CSS styles on the table, but with JS the table becomes collapsed by default & the page text does not jump. The other JS only functionality that extends the page width that does not cause the page text to jump when the table is opened is the previously mentioned fullscreen "Toggle limited content width" button in the bottom right. Also, since I cannot edit the original comment here is the previous CSS condensed:

  .mw-page-container,.mw-content-container{max-width:none!important;}

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