241–250 of 288 posts
> Research has shown that limiting the width of longform text leads to a more comfortable reading experience, and better retention of the content itself. Is this actually true? I'm curious if anybody has sources for this and if it's a common UX practice. I tend to use wider windows than traditional 8:9 half-screens and this max-width practice drives me nuts.
https://gist.github.com/kool-user/457cbf0100e075cc83977c1fe8...
Thanks, I hate it. Everything I loathe about "modern" web design made manifest here, and switched on without warning! At least I can turn it off in settings.
You can even turn off responsive design in the settings. I should have checked earlier.
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Yeah, I hate it, it introduced lots of white space (I'd say about 20-25% of the screen) on the right-hand side. I don't see how this new version [1] is better than this old version [2] [1] https://imgur.com/a/IZHxqOy [2] https://imgur.com/a/q1PD3WY
The reason for this is readability. Long lines of text are empirically bad for readability, making it hard for readers to find the correct next line. However, the line length Wikipedia picked seems to be a bad compromise. At around 120 characters per line it‘s double the recommend line length (60 characters). If you look at newspapers, magazines and books you will see the 60 character rule of thumb adhered to pretty…
Unfortunately, Wikipedia uses a lot of right-side floats, some of which are quite wide. They are also frequently referred as “on the right” in the main text, which can be quite jarring on mobile/minerva where they might be above or below.
I could imagine a breakpoint where those floats would turn into margin notes, but that sounds extraordinarily fiddly.
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The reason for this is readability. Long lines of text are empirically bad for readability, making it hard for readers to find the correct next line. However, the line length Wikipedia picked seems to be a bad compromise. At around 120 characters per line it‘s double the recommend line length (60 characters). If you look at newspapers, magazines and books you will see the 60 character rule of thumb adhered to pretty…
> mostly because scrolling is fundamentally incompatible with columns How so? You just scroll horizontally rather than vertically. Even actual scrolls come in both vertical and horizontal (column-based) formats.
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Yeah, I hate it, it introduced lots of white space (I'd say about 20-25% of the screen) on the right-hand side. I don't see how this new version [1] is better than this old version [2] [1] https://imgur.com/a/IZHxqOy [2] https://imgur.com/a/q1PD3WY
The reason for this is readability. Long lines of text are empirically bad for readability, making it hard for readers to find the correct next line. However, the line length Wikipedia picked seems to be a bad compromise. At around 120 characters per line it‘s double the recommend line length (60 characters). If you look at newspapers, magazines and books you will see the 60 character rule of thumb adhered to pretty…
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I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. As it stands, I think the new design is a much better default for most people. Also, zooming and changing browser window size is, while only a keystroke away, isn’t something I want to do just to make a site that should be optimized for reading text more legible. It should just default to that way. In shor…
> I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. How? Seriously, if you have a way to do this that works for pages in general I'll be extremely grateful. I tried using a user stylesheet that said * { max-width: 100% !important } for a while, but that breaks too many non-root elements on all sorts of sites. Whereas making the page narrow when it doesn't…
You can have one style apply to multiple domains, I have a simple one for making text black and setting the font size and line spacing which works on a dozen sites or so. You can even use SCSS or Stylus instead of plain CSS if you want.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I hate it, it introduced lots of white space (I'd say about 20-25% of the screen) on the right-hand side. I don't see how this new version [1] is better than this old version [2] [1] https://imgur.com/a/IZHxqOy [2] https://imgur.com/a/q1PD3WY
The reason for this is readability. Long lines of text are empirically bad for readability, making it hard for readers to find the correct next line. However, the line length Wikipedia picked seems to be a bad compromise. At around 120 characters per line it‘s double the recommend line length (60 characters). If you look at newspapers, magazines and books you will see the 60 character rule of thumb adhered to pretty…
My initial take: I actually like this a lot. The body text is narrower which makes for easier reading. The sidebar with an updating highlight of current place in document is really nice too. I don't mind the "wasted space": Wikipedia is primarily about reading, and any well typeset book or web page should have generous margins so the line length is not too long.
My first take: it’s different so it sucks. The lack of visual separation between the main content and the menu on the left is atrocious. Second take: oh wait, the menu in the left was completely useless and they replaced it with the table of contents for that particular entry. That’s actually a welcome change. I’ll get used to “different so it sucks” soon enough anyway, that’s my fault not theirs. It’s kind of fascin…
My initial take: I actually like this a lot. The body text is narrower which makes for easier reading. The sidebar with an updating highlight of current place in document is really nice too. I don't mind the "wasted space": Wikipedia is primarily about reading, and any well typeset book or web page should have generous margins so the line length is not too long.
For 16:9 screen sure, old wikipedia is too wide but I use side tabs in browser so my browsing area is closer to classical 4:3 monitor and the old one fit very well (for me) on that.