<p>On Mar 21, 2012 12:00 PM, "Guido van Rossum" <<a href="mailto:guido@python.org">guido@python.org</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
> On Mar 21, 2012 5:44 AM, "Ned Batchelder" <<a href="mailto:ned@nedbatchelder.com">ned@nedbatchelder.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> > The best thing to do is to set a max-width in ems, say 50em. This leaves the text at a reasonable width, but adapts naturally for people with larger fonts.<br>
><br>
> Please, no, not even this "improved" version of coddling. If you're<br>
> formatting e.g. a newspaper or a book, by all means (though I still<br>
> think the user should be given ultimate control -- and I don't mean<br>
> editing the CSS using the browser's development tools :-). But when<br>
> reading docs there are all sorts of reasons why I might want to<br>
> stretch the window to maximum width and nothing's more frustrating<br>
> than a website that forces clipping, folding or a horizontal scroll<br>
> bar even when I make the window wide enough.</p>
<p>Well, the only thing that's more frustrating than that is having to resize my window to make the text readable, and then *still* having to scroll horizontally for the wide bits, or have to alternate sizes of the window.</p>
<p>Just because flowing text paragraphs are set to a moderate max-width, that doesn't mean that code samples, tables, etc. all have to be the *same* max-width, or have any max-width at all. That is, keeping flowing text readable is not incompatible with having arbitrarily-wide code, tables, etc.</p>
<p>(Text width is an ergonomic consideration as much as font size and color: too wide in absolute characters, and the eye has to hunt up and down to find where to start reading the next line.)<br>
</p>