80-character comments: does it matter?

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/12/09 15:22, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> 	Does it actually matter that comments are wrapped at 80 characters? We
> do it because that's the exact width of the textarea, and so the
> comments will come out looking almost exactly like they do in the textarea.
>
> 	Does that actually matter?

I think it does. People often use both the expected width and the 
fixed-width font to do ASCII-art diagrams.

> I'm asking because there is currently a bug
> that would be resolved if we did all comment-wrapping client side.

You mean using HTML features to get the browser to do the wrapping?

My understanding is that there is a long history to why we got to where 
we are today with the way comments are wrapped. (I thought you'd been 
around for some of it?) Before making any changes, you'd need to read 
the old bugs. Myk Melez would also be a good person to ask - I seem to 
remember him being involved in the work.

> (Though I'm actually not sure that all browsers can do that reliably,
> but I haven't tested in a while so I forget.) The only problem is that,
> as far as I'm aware, there's no way in CSS to say "this element should
> be exactly X characters wide" so we'd lose the "wrap at exactly 80
> characters" functionality.

That is indeed true.

Gerv
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