It's a hedge against various screen resolutions that hasn't caught up to the fact we've figured out reactionary design and variable-width layouts by now.
You don't need anything nearly as complicated as responsive CSS to define a reasonable relative width for a block that uses a FIXED-WIDTH FONT.
Also, reading very wide text blocks is a pain in the ass.
Sure is. But if that content area were 50% wider, it would be 1476px -- which would only take up about 78% of the width of a 1920x1080 monitor, which is a pretty standard resolution for desktops and laptops in 2013. 4/5 of the width of a 16:9 screen's not bad, right?
Sometime around the turn of the century, everybody decided that website boundaries should be defined in absolute instead of relative values, because they are much much easier to code that way and look much more consistent across browsers.
Which is fine and fucking dandy, but 984px wide was ALREADY a pretty damn low width for a screen back then. Can you even buy a 1280x1024 monitor anymore?
It's stupid. It's too wide for a phone and too narrow for a tablet.
Man, the problem isn't that there's white space on the sides. The problem is that because of the arbitrary width of the content column, there is a horizontal scrollbar for that chunk of logging.
The horizontal scrollbar is the injury. The majority of the window being used for absolutely fucking nothing is the insult.
Not knowing anything about the code/coding displayed, would wrapping the text have been problematic?
It's hypothetically easier to read code if it preserves whitespace -- linebreaks and tab placement are important.
But in practice, (1) code you can't read is not fucking useful, (2) wrapping does not affect linebreaks and you can paste wrapped text into a terminal just fine, and (3) given that we're just looking at console output, no, the whitespace is not terribly important in this instance or the vast majority of code tags on the site.
It'd be understandable if that column was wide enough or if the text in that paste widget was small enough to accommodate 80 characters. That's a standard terminal size and you can argue that any scrolling/line breaks there would happen on a default TTY window or some other anachronistic thing. But no, the text width there seems to be a little over 50 characters.
This would seem like an edge case until you realize that we're talking about a site about asking development questions, and specifically a subweb for asking questions that will pretty commonly involve terminal output, so why they acted like the target width in characters was big unknown is agh fuck it.
Right, pretty much this. It would have been pretty fucking trivial to define the width of the code block as 80 characters using em's or ex's (because when you are using a fixed-width font, 80em = 80ex = 80 times the width of any damn character because they are ALL THE SAME WIDTH). Failing that, I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that if there is a scrollbar INSIDE your webpage, it had better be on (1) a large textarea like the one I am currently typing in or (2) the index on an API (the single case where frames are still an acceptable form of design). Having to scroll around the interior of a webpage to read content is just fucking awful.
Indeed, that's the major reason why websites ARE designed to be so narrow -- so that you don't have to scroll around them horizontally on a low-res screen. But again, this design fails on low-res, hi-res, and medium-res levels. It's just terrible.
