Rob <nom...@example.com> wrote: > to use 80-character lines. That was just lazyness and adherance to > capabilities of hardware available at the time.
No, it was not. It enables formatting text in a sensible way, which is not that easily possible with reflowing text. About 70 characters is also about the most readable line length, be it on screen or in a book. > When graphical screens became mainstream, and scalable windows and > proportional fonts entered the scene, the 80-character line was obsolete. No, it was not. Just grab any novel from your bookshelf, lines will be about 70 or 80 characters long, most likely. > Only, the existing users failed to realize this because they often stuck > to existing hardware or emulated existing hardware on new environments. > (including running a 80x25 terminal emulator on Windows) The relevant "hardware" is the ability of the human visual system to follow a line without losing the line. > In fact, it has happened again later. Now, people want to read their > mail on small phone screens, and again they prefer wrapped paragraphs > over fixed line lengths. For the majority of the users there is no > problem because they already switched to that system before, but those > who want 80-character lines again have a problem. I like to have the same layout on my phone as on the desktop screen. That way I find things easier (adaptive layouts make web pages sometimes look completely different on the phone, making it necessary to "learn" them again). I prefer to just zoom in and out with the normal desktop layout. /ralph _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
