Thread:Project:Support desk/Wordwrap in email notifications/reply (3)

Absolutely, complete books have been written about typography - these numbers are established knowledge.

Ideal line lengths are for books 50-60 signs and for newspapers even only 30-40 signs. Around 32 signs is what most people can read in one go, without their eyes jumping. For websites the problem just is that, when you don't use a fixed width, you cannot predict, how many signs you can show in one line for a given visitor. This situation - for the line length - is not ideal, but what do you want to do? You could set a fixed line length here as well (would technically most likely be a width for the main div container), but you would then throw away lots of space. Many other sites, especially newspaper sites, use a fixed width anyway. However, they usually do not only display one column, but have their stuff in multiple columns, with something like a comment at the right and further links below and in the text they have many pictures and maybe videos so that they use the space available anyway. However, content structures in an encyclopedia are different from those in a newspaper. Wikipedia is not a newspaper site.