Literate Web Pages...Minimize Horizontal Scrolling

Minimize the need for horizontal scrolling.

Most importantly, avoid the need to scroll back and forth horizontally to read each line of text.

Why

Having to scroll back and forth repeatedly, once for each line of text, is obviously bad. (Imagine folding a letter back along a vertical line and flipping back and forth to read each line.)

[To be assimilated: Web authors apparently don't realize how often they're forcing horizontal scrolling. For example, they erroneously assume that the browser window size is the same as the (assumed) screen size. See Don't Assume a Full-Screen Browser Window.]

Even less-frequent horizontal scrolling is still much less convenient than vertical scrolling:

• Readers frequently scroll vertically anyway; they shouldn't also have to switch to and from horizontal scrolling.
• Scrolling horizontally is less convenient--there are many more ways of scrolling vertically than horizontally on typical computers.

Details

Generally, understand how HTML and browsers were meant to be used to adapt the page layout to the user's display. See the Literate Web Pages...Understand the Medium page.

[To be assimilated:

• let text wrap to fit window
• Avoid fixed-width pages.
• don't tie text width to graphics width (don't put in same table)
• if text column is fixed width, set based on smallest browser window size, not _predominant_ size or _screen_ size

]