No, you can't assume that 72 characters isn't "too wide". My rule of thumb for that is more like 24 characters. Even 24 characters can be "too wide" in cases that I run into, but that is usually only on smaller-than-typical devices so I don't sweat it too much1. With nodelets and thread indenting and other things, it is quite easy for 60 characters to be "too wide" (no, my browser window is rarely maximized).

1 I do prefer that PerlMonks renders reasonably on smaller-than-typical devices and am happy to find that PerlMonks actually does a better job of this than most web sites I run into. I don't mind when the rare <pre> section makes the site a bit too wide for a small-display client. But a 50-character line in a <pre> section can make a thread nearly impossible to read on a smaller device's browser.

It wouldn't be particularly hard to parse <pre> blocks and re-render them as things that use fixed-width fonts and preserve whitespace but also are willing to wrap. That way we'd have something a lot like <code> but that allows HTML inside of it. And we wouldn't have to beat people up to avoid using <pre> tags. Not that this will be implemented this month.

- tye        

In reply to Re^3: <pre> vs. <code> tags ("wide") by tye
in thread <pre> vs. <code> tags by almut

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