for two reasons.
- the table of contents always displays on screen when your browser window is wide enough so you can jump to each section without having to scroll all the way up, and
- for me, sentences are pretty dang hard to read when they're as wide as a typical widescreen display. i am happy that one of the biggest offenders of this trend (the old wikipedia layout circa 2011-early 2023) is now gone, so that people like me can have an easier time reading articles without having to use an obscure browser extension or CSS hacks to de-widen the page.
there are a lot of sites (mainly personal sites, i've noticed) that still do this, though: whether it be through malice or inexperience, i've had to squash down a bunch of sites' widths down from its maximum width of (whatever width the browser window is) to a readable one of about 600-900px. i'm not exactly sure why this is, but it's easier to read sentences when they're about the width you would see in a typical book. probably has something to do with eyestrain
if you're reading this and if you plan on making a website that people can visit on desktop: please, set the max-width of the content in your CSS. to probably something within that range i mentioned in the last paragraph. me (and hopefully other people, because i have seen Taran Van Hemert1 mention this problem once as well) will thank you.
oh, and setting the paragraph's line-height to be somewhere around 1.5-1.75 would be nice too, but i won't make you go too far in that regard
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former editor for Linus Tech Tips. i would link to the video he mentioned this in but i can't find it for the life of me
