How wide should the text column be on a page?

Page Summary:

After some consideration and experimentation, leaving it to automatically scale to 100% of the browser window seems best. This allows the user to determine how many words per column they want, by simply resizing their window.

Forced to X pixels? Forced to a Y% of the window? Forced to Z pixels?

This page was inspired off of http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TenWordLine

With HTML/CSS, how do you set a table to have a width of "less than or equal to 700"? Right now, for readability reasons, this table is forced to a width of 700. A problem arises when a window is resized to something smaller than that: horizontal scrollbars appear. In order to read faster, you want about 10-12 words on a line, which is a common trick with speed reading. So, there is a struggle between letting the editor determine the layout (so the site looks nice) and the reader (the browser) determine the layout to their wishes and needs. --Wim

My vote would be to not ever fix the width of a to be read content area. That is why web browser windows are resizable, which I almost always do when I'm reading a page vs. browseing. -- fozbaca

I've removed the width=700, it looks ok now. When a window is resized, the table gets resized appopriately as well, and it looks nice. The porportion of black background is fairly even around the table as well, at least in netscape. --Wim

Hmmm.... but now last10 doesn't look nice... -- Wim

You might want to put a width="100%" in the template table. --fozbaca

K... I think this is good now. --Wim