

Ask HN: Why readability is ignored? - exslacker

There are lots of researches on what is the ideal line length is but sites like wikipedia or HN still let the lines be too long.
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nostrademons
There's a lot of research on the optimal line length _for reading_ but there
are a number of other considerations that go into website design. For example:

Many sites (including both Wikipedia and HN) practice responsive design, where
the width & layout of screen elements adapts to the size of your window.
There's a good argument that providing the user control of their own situation
outweighs the consensus research on the "average user". After all, you're
trying to make _each_ user happy, you aren't trying to make a hypothetical
average user happy.

Most of the time, users skim sites, they don't read them. Optimizing for
reading is counterproductive when the user just wants to find a sentence or
two and go away.

Sites can become aesthetically unpleasant if they have a small column of text
and a gigantic amount of whitespace. Nobody reads the site when the user
bounces.

Sometimes sites are set up to use indentation to convey hierarchy, eg. in
comment threads. These can also look awkward if the right margin keeps
shifting over with each new comment. (Although personally, I prefer that to
having tiny little comments that are 2-3 words wide.)

There's a meta-point here: oftentimes, academic research into one specific
area is not relevant to a larger product, because there are other trade-offs
that have to be made. When I first went into software, I wondered why all this
cool academic research into programming language design was being totally
ignored. It turns out that oftentimes the really cool language features like
macros, type inference, predicate dispatch, tail-call optimization, etc. have
side-effects that make them impractical for use in a real software system.

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27182818284
Because ultimately we can control it?

Unlike printed text that is _finished_ finished, text on the web changes per
device, time of day, etc.

You might be very interested in
[https://www.readability.com/](https://www.readability.com/) which allows a
person to instantly morph the majority of articles to their set reading
standards with a plugin or bookmark.

