Pages with long passages of text should always be designed to print properly, as the majority of students will print those pages, and if the page is too wide they will lose several words from each line of text along the right margin of the page. Note that maximum height in the table below refers only to the height of the page area that will be visible on small monitors without scrolling. Once the real world started working on the Web, graphic designers began adapting the primitive tools of HTML to produce documents that looked more like their print counterparts. The layout conventions of print documents have evolved over hundreds of years for very concrete and practical reasons, and offer many functional advantages over the plain, single-column page layout envisioned by the original designers of the Web. Many quantitative studies have shown that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.
Most designers use HTML tables to accomplish column layouts on Web pages.
Setting fixed table dimensions keeps the column width of the text the same no matter how large the reader's screen is. Just be sure to keep the layout within the safe viewing and printing dimensions given above. Designers often use the space at the top of the scan column to provide navigational links, small illustrations, or parenthetic commentary on the main text. The foundation of good Web design is intuitive functionality, not aesthetics. Each one of us who authors and publishes Web documents is obliged to make our information clear, accurate, and accessible, and then perhaps pleasing to the eye.