Here's some text which has been wrapped at 70 columns. This is
the way that I format my gopher content most of the time. I was
recently surprised to discover that if I turn on the (usually disabled
because it's so damn annoying and of limited use) screen rotation
feature of my phone, when held sideways (i.e. in landscape
orientation) this looks just fine in Pocket Gopher. And my phone
screen is way smaller than the modern average. Can anybody *not* read
this sideways on a phone? If everybody *can* read this is landscape
orientation, I'd say that's a strong argument against current gopher
text conventions being a real problem for mobile devices. Sure,
holding your phone sideways is a lot clumsier and less convenient than
holding it "normally", but most of the content on gopher is not really
oriented toward quick, easy, mindless reading, so is this actually a
problem?
Now I've dropped it down to 60 characters, just a little
narrower. I suspect this is still too wide to be read on
most phones in a profile orientation. Which is perhaps a
shame, as I think this still looks perfectly normal on a
laptop terminal. I wouldn't resist formatting all my future
phlog posts to this width if it would make peoples' lives
easier.
Let's go a little bit more narrow, down to 50
characters per line. Actually, even this doesn't
look ridiculous on my screen right now. Can
anybody read *this* on their phone in portrait
orientation? It's still too wide for my phone.
40 characters per line is about the
point that I think things start to look
a little odd on a real computer, to the
point that some people might grumble
about things looking weird just to
please those upstart phone-using
whipper-snappers. Alas, it's just a
little too wide to wrap nicely on my
phone in portrait mode. I suspect,
though, that on more typically sized
screens this could actually work nicely?
I don't think this is unworkably narrow.
The next step down, though, of
just 30 characters per line,
well...we're not animals. We
can't be expected to live like
this, can we? It *does* work
for me, though. By which I
mean that when I view this on
my phone without the screen
rotated there's no weird line
wrapping artifacts. I don't
particularly like the way it
looks, though. I wonder if...
..bumping things up just a litle
more to 35 chars is enough to make
much of a difference? This still
wraps nicely for me. I wonder if I
could get used to reading and
writing long entries in this
format. You always hear from web
designers about how shorter lines
are easier to read than longer
ones, although IIRC the actual
peer-reviewed scientifict
literature on this point is full of
conflicting results, so maybe
that's not true. But I don't
think this width is any worse
than a newspaper or magazine
article. Maybe advanced clients
for real computers could actually
format articles read this way as
multiple side-by-side columns, like
a newspaper?
