I think Kirk nails it. Virtually every type of textual data we're accustomed to reading has margins. To remove these makes reading harder for me.
On a digital document, I suspect that one reason it makes reading more difficult is that when I get to the end of a line, without glancing down to see if there's a scroll bar, I don't know if the text wraps at the edge or if I'm not seeing the full contents of the line.
I have to be honest that when I first saw Brent's blog post, I found it to be utterly ridiculous. It made me think of one site whose overall design I love, but whose main text area drives me nuts: kottke.org. If the browser window isn't wide wide enough, there's no margin to the left of the text. I find it completely unreadable without widening my browser window.
by jburka — May 05
On a digital document, I suspect that one reason it makes reading more difficult is that when I get to the end of a line, without glancing down to see if there's a scroll bar, I don't know if the text wraps at the edge or if I'm not seeing the full contents of the line.
I have to be honest that when I first saw Brent's blog post, I found it to be utterly ridiculous. It made me think of one site whose overall design I love, but whose main text area drives me nuts: kottke.org. If the browser window isn't wide wide enough, there's no margin to the left of the text. I find it completely unreadable without widening my browser window.