I like the line length limitation. I am older and my eyesight getting worse.
I would like to be able to scale up the font to fill the window's width rather
than add blank panels on the sides which is useless space for me. ~~~~
Topic on Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Features/Limiting content width/Flow
Automated fontscaling and barscaling would make an actually useful improvement, increasing both legibility and the aesthetics.
The proposal at hand is a precise contradiction, as it makes the UX only worse. Not only it keeps the archaic, non-responsive pixels-hardcoded design, but also it imposes a very small font size on a modern desktop (esp. WQGA, 4K), and imposes these silly margins which even make the manual upscaling (zoom) impaired, as the resulting space is too narrow.
Did anyone on the team actually test it on some real desktop, with 27", 28" WQGA and 4K monitors, as well as on modern 14" laptops with the same WQGA or 4K? I guess not.
@Robert.Harker thanks for your question. Based on the lengthy discussions that took place during the 2014 Typography Refresh we thought that changes to the font-size would be even more controversial than changes to line-length. I agree that font-size is a critical aspect of readability and we do hope to experiment with improvements later on in the project, so please do stay tuned and please continue to share your thoughts and opinions. Thanks so much!