Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:37 UTC
The proposal is to have paragraphs autoformat themselves side by side when the horizontal space is available to do so. It's ungainly and less usable to have sentences and paragraphs that span more than 1000 pixels on larger wide screen monitors. It's a nice update that would greatly increase the readability of the articles and take advantage of the increasing high screen resolutions that are being used. Either sections of an articles should appear side-by-side on large monitors, or optimally, longer articles should automatically flow into a two column layout maintaining the top to bottom hierarchy of article sections currently used on wikipedia.
Multi-column layouts are hugely unreliable and notoriously problematic, complicating layout, scrolling, readability, performance, and printing -- and that's on top of simply not working consistently across browsers. The most sustainable solution here is to have a sane maximum width for the content area to keep things looking nice for people who choose to make their browser windows much, much wider than they ever should be.
