Board Thread:Darwin/@comment-2118812-20130822134212/@comment-3474542-20130908142059

Pecoes wrote: Ah, yes, I missed the fact that there's an upper limit. Sorry about that!

Still. I'm not convinced that your design team did enough research, as the upper limit for CPL (charactes per line) lies way outside the norm. I honestly cannot think of any major web site (disregarding Wikpedia for a moment) that has more than 120 CPL. The standard seems to be somewhere between 60 and 80 CPL. The 200 CPL of Darwin is an extreme outlier. Reading lines that are so overly long is uncomfortable and I usually leave web sites that force me to read such overly wide texts immediately. Maybe I'm alone in this, but the fact that I was taught never to set text this wide in art school and the fact that it violates common practice leads me to believe I'm not.

On top of that Darwin doesn't handle zoom gracefully. The layout jerks around and reproportions every time I hit Ctrl-Minus or Ctrl-Plus. That's rather disorienting and unsightly. If you do want to set the text in a way that forces me to zoom, you should at least make the zooming comfortable.

I actually like having a large amount of content area. If a page has too much text, break it up -- use paragraph tags, images and other content.