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From the article above it says that it is easier for users to read a line that is over 100 characters long. That’s fine, but when is it too wide. A lot of people here are starting and have been creating sites based on liquid layout, but what about people with large monitors. Are they forced to read very long lines of text?
I have always had a problem reading text that is very long. It is easier for me to get confused and forget what line I am on. I would rather read a page that has text that is no wider than 700 pixels wide.
Is anyone cutting off his or her liquid layouts? Monitors are getting bigger and wide formats are already out. Is this something you think about with your liquid layouts? I know css has some features for this, but as of now are really not implemented as well as we would like.
Having been publishing large sites for 7 years now, "resolution migration" has been a problem I've dealt with before -and it appears I am staring at this repeat offender yet again. Though I haven't implemented the beta template on public pages yet, I'm considering tackling the large-width problem by sniffing resolution and swapping css files in order to raise the font size when higher resolutions are encountered. By reproportioning both the fonts and major images in the main content column, I've been able to approximate the same "look" across 4 popular resolutions.
Results indicated that, by itself, text width does not influence readability; however, there was a significant interaction between text width and margin width.
That meshes with my own experience. I work on a number of text-based sites and usually design for about 60 characters wide (conveniently, about 400px, or about right for a center body column in a 3-column 800x600 layout). If the text is too wide, it becomes very easy to lose one's place while reading. If the text is too narrow of course, it becomes annoying to have to skip down every few words, a process which inhibits the reader's ability to absorb the content.
There is a working draft out for columns in CSS3, [w3.org...] . But I think it would primarily be useful for printing, where the pages will have a defined length. On screen, who'd want to scroll all the way to the bottom of one column then jump back multiple screens to the top to start the second? It would be very disorienting.
