Weekly Tip for Webmasters

Limiting Line Length for Readability

If you have content rich site that is text heavy and you want to keep the attention of your visitors, limit the length of your lines.

Web sites and content are all about information; visitors come to your Web site to read content. Unfortunately the default structure of an HTML document often makes that content hard to read.

Publishers of books and magazines learned quickly that blocks of text are easier to read if they're limited to around 50 to 80 characters per line, with 65 being about the average.

Lines longer than 80 characters are hard to follow. When your eye reaches the end of a line, it has trouble finding the beginning of the next line. Likewise, very short lines require your eye to constantly scan back and forth.

Unfortunately, basic HTML text tags don't allow you to control the width of your lines. Since HTML was designed to be machine independent, early versions of the language deliberately avoided such "look and feel" issues. The standard paragraph tag gives you no control over the width of your line. Instead paragraphs of text are liquid, flowing until they reach another page element or the edge of the browser window. This usually results in text that's hard to read.

On a 800x600 pixel monitor, each line is nearly 135 characters long when the browser is set to use 100% of the screen!

Your best solution is to learn how to use HTML tables to divide the page into two or more columns, with the widest column containing the page's key content. This makes the content easier to read and allows space for related links and navigation elements in the other columns.