> Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to display content?

You can always read these posts in Reader Mode on your browser and adjust the text size, paragraph width etc. Even on this site, I have to magnify the display to 130% to view comfortably on a hiDPI screen.

The reason why most blogs are narrow is because blog templates are still from the 2000s in terms of how they show content on desktop . Traditionally the right hand third of the screen would display ads or a blog roll, while the left hand third would show the site's navigation .

Over time this changed, but what stayed the same was showing body text in the central third columns.

Content width is an odd thing to complain about:

- everybody limits it. This is because no matter the size of your screen, the human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high. As a web page writer, you need to take care of that, because the default presentation will be bad for everyone if you don't.

- as it happens, the author uses Subtrack so they might not even have picked that size consciously.

- reader mode works on this page, so you can use this to read the post the way you want, and if you like the content and would like to read it regularly, there is an RSS feed that you can use with a client that displays posts the way you want.

The last point is why separate style sheets and correctly structured content are so nice: if you have such a strong opinion, you can tweak stuff or even ignore the style sheet and use yours. And reader mode actually makes that practical for most blog posts / articles.

(that said, I agree that the width seems particularly small, I replaced it with 80ex just to try and it looked better to me - but I just set up a new WordPress website and the default 2025 theme has the same ~730px width for the content, I don't know what's with this default size)

> human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high.

That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text (even more so re code with all the extra structural helps) that's responsible for a lot of vertical space waste.

But at any rate you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable, no need for the author to incorrectly guess what's best for you

> That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text

A common myth that seems quite well researched [1], no? Do you have some evidence of the contradictory?

> you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable

Websites all have different layouts, you'd have to change the window width (and/or zoom level) for each website. That would be quite clunky… on devices where it's at all possible.

Forcing users to resize their windows constantly is not a nice alternative.

[1] https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5765

But it isn't well researched, that's precisely the myth that in these areas there's solid science with precise thresholds! I've read your article and it includes many gems such as max line length of 80 cpl, which is useless to determine whether a line of 150 is bad. Or it suffers from a universal issue of this kind science - tiny sample sizes or unrepresentative composition (the perennial college student, here goes your reading skill diversity relevant for making broad conclusions about human eyes). Or it ignores that length isn't everything, there is also density (some research did vary it, but even then it was only doubling), which a simple cpl count used in many cited papers doesn't measure

And the main factor against long lines is errors returning to the next line's beginning.

First, what's the well researched level drop between 130 and 150 for a person with a high reading skill level?

Then, have they "well researched" such simple typographical guides as the varying line widths (check out the layout of this very article, note that it's not rectangular, but one side is continuously growing in length, cool trick!). Or having some alternating line markers at line beginning/end to make visual match easy (similar, but not identical, to tables where you have full line highlighted)?

Maybe the most efficient reading is at line length of 333 with line guides and semantics guides (like those bionic reading extensions) at higher text density? You could be missing out on +10% speed bump and 4% comprehension level! And the head movements would also reduce muscle strain from a prolonged fixed head/neck position! Or maybe the very best is even higher 1234 but requires some curved ultrawide monitor to fit you whole peripheral vision and immerse you in the text without other visual distractions? I'd be curious to know what the real scientific eye limits are when it comes to reading.

But also efficiency isn't the only important metric for casual reading of web blogs, while a lot of research focused on that. There was some research about user perception that found no difference between line lengths. So there is that.

I also don't get why would you ever need to adjust window width per website? Say, for me the best line length is max 133 at font size 14 and char spacing X. So if I set my window at about this width so that no more text fits, and it reflows, I'm set. Yes, there are sites that disrespect user font size preferences, which would require zooming (or reading plugin), but this true regardless of the max width preferences, and also they would disrespect whatever the width guidelines are.

Interesting points, thanks.

So IIUC, for you, evidence is weak and we don't actually know either way and we haven't explored alternatives to limiting light length enough that could help comprehension and speed. Fair enough.

> I also don't get why would you ever need to adjust window width per website?

Because websites define different margins, may have a side menu, or two... There might be stuff around the content that take width. And responsive designs may worsen the effect.

Limiting width is what you should do, if the lines are too long you will struggle to find the next line when skipping back.