Correcting the Line Length

I asked this morning what I can improve on jskatas.org. Daniel answered with something that I can apply to picostitch too: use the "correct line length". He pointed me to practicaltypography.com which states:

Overly long lines are a common problem, but they’re easy to correct. Shorter lines will make a big difference in the legibility and professionalism of your layout. [...]

Shorter lines are more comfortable to read than longer lines. [...]

Aim for an average line length of 45–90 characters, including spaces.

Sounds easy, just do width: 80rem right? Should be fixed when you read this 😉.

The site also states

Newspaper columns are very tall, so they also have to be very narrow to make vertical tracking easy.

To be honest, I have been thinking about that a lot before, but never thought of it to be such an issue until today, when I got that response twice that I should limit the page width of the jskatas.org site. So I acted right away, since this seems to be important to people. I still want to make sure to not waste too much space on people's wide screens. Wouldn't it be an aweful waste of space? Now I will just think the other way around, I make the side narrower and will think about how to use the whitespace. So I flip the priorities.

A Note on practicaltypography.com

Since these notes are just for me, I have to note the following: on the practicaltypography.com page the first kinda table "How to use Word Count" confused me totally. It took me a while to understand what it was for. On the left it said "Word", "Mac OS Word" and "Pages" and I had no idea what was meant. They also used < and > for menu items that I should click. I had to read the table three times until I understood what it was. I didn't expect that on a site that teaches me about what my site should look like. Surprise.
I also missed headlines on that page, which I learned in Don't make me think make reading easier.
I don't mean to rant. I am just writing down my observations and learnings, reflecting on them.

Reading through other sites like Block Quotations and Page Margins on practicaltypography.com, I see that not all sources agree on everything, I don't understand inches well enough and not everything makes sense to me. Also I see some rules from "Don't make me think" are not applied on his page. So in the end, I still have to think, hehe.

Thanks for free resource and the learnings @Matthew Butterick!