This study examined the effects of line length on reading speed, comprehension, and user satisfaction of online news articles
psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/...Posted Feb 1, 2010, 3:37 PM UTC
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psychology.wichita.edu
With most content placed in floating, user re-sizeable divs, I can't see how any web designer can really control for cpl to take advantage of the study results.
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Do you have any examples of sites that let users re-size content? I have yet to see one.
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Errr… this one?
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Oh you mean 100% width pages, not user resizeable pages, I don't know about most people, but having to resize my browser window when I usually have it maximized, is not going to happen.
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On OSX, maximizing windows is much less common.
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the problem people miss a lot, is that I may only see (for an example) 50 characters per line on a 200px fixed width div. But someone else might see 25 characters per line on the same 200 px fixed width div.
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This helps make the case that text should be in elements whose widths are a carefully considered constant (not infinitely resizable).
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In essence what are they saying here? That greater line length aids readability and comprehension or hurts it? I'm a little unclear.
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Perhaps you would understand it better if they used shorter or longer lines.
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20 students is not a big enough sample size to be meaningful.
Also, they found that the longest line-length fared best and didn't go back for another round of trials to investigate the best possible length. For all they know, it's >100 cpl.