PART 1
Define and conquer
Let’s start by defining readability. According to a classic paper by Edgar Dale and Jeanne Chall, readability is “…the sum total (…) of all those elements within a given piece of printed material that affect the success a group of readers have with it. The success is the extent to which they understand it, read it at an optimal speed, and find it interesting.”
In other words, readability is a metric that evaluates the ease and comfort of reading a particular text.
Evolution of layouts and typesetting on the web
Part 3
The first website was published in 1990 by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee and now it seems like an eyesore. Early web sites were basic, using vertically structured, text-heavy pages with few graphics. Before the introduction of tables as a web page structure, there were few design components and no way to emulate the layouts of conventional printed texts.
In the early web there were no people well-versed in typesetting. Website layouts were fluid (did not have fixed width), so text lines came in any possible width. That was not so great: all sorts of typographic rules aimed at text legibility were smudged,” says Readymag product designer Stas Aki. The situation demanded new approaches to the creation of web layouts.
The variety of screen sizes also strongly impacted web layouts and quality of typesetting. While print designers knew beforehand the paper format that will house their work, web designers worked in a situation of uncertainty, knowing that their designs would appear in multiple ways on multiple screens.
This problem was mostly tackled with the mass introduction of responsive design around 2007, along with the launch of the first iPhone.
1st generattion iPhone
iPhone 11
I think it pushed the idea of responsive web design to the forefront. Mobile sites were often made separately from the desktop version, and that was happening before iPhones existed. I think the first iPhone is a symbol of when mobile web browsing became a mainstream thing. As far as readability in particular, the iPhone definitely set a lot of standards for resolution; like the idea of having a retina display with an extremely high resolution,” Nick Sherman recalls.
New generation mobile devices allow a resolution up to 1000dpi. With the continuing increase in screen resolution for desktop computers and portable devices, readability should improve as well.