The Book of CSS3

Chapter 7. Multiple Columns

Although computer screens are getting wider, studies still show that people have difficulty reading long lines of text. (Roughly 65 to 75 characters per line is generally considered a comfortable length to read.) This convention has led to restricted layouts and websites that don’t take advantage of the opportunities wider screens present.

For years, magazines and newspapers have used multiple columns to flow content—addressing both the issue of long text lines and how to pack a lot of copy into limited spaces. Now, with the advent of the Multi-column Layout Module in CSS3 (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/), websites ...