[WEB4LIB] Re: Web Page Width - To Restrict or Not to Restrict

[Thomas Dowling]

Samuel Mcdonald wrote:

> "...
> Conventional design wisdom has been to restrict the width of flowing text
> to somewhere between 550 and 780 pixels wide, using tables to do this.
> .."
>   http://lois.co.uk/web/articles/page-widths.shtml


Note that this page was originally written in 2000, when controlling
widths with tables was only a few years out of date.  :-)  Also, the
author isn't arguing for this but citing it as Received Wisdom.  She
concludes, "The end result was that I made the decision not to restrict
the line length at all...Not having a fixed width also means that the
page will always print properly."


The problem is that there's no predictable relationship between a number
of pixels and any measurement in the real world.  You could use inches
or centimeters instead; that way you'd know (kind of) the actual text
width at the user's end, but you still wouldn't know how that compares
to his or her preferred text size.

You can get pretty successful results measuring the widths of text
blocks the way typographers have for centuries: using ems.  A typical
line length for book text is between 60 and 70em.  A good readable line
length online is (IMO at least) more like 40 to 45em.  An advantage of
using ems is that larger screens tend to use more pixels per character,
so windows that differ a lot in pixels or inches may be very close to
each other in ems.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu