Usability: to limit max screen width for the best user experience or leave it to auto-width?

Question

I have a blog that uses auto width of a screen (responsive design). Most blog posts are long texts, over 1000 words + comments.

My questions is - from user experience (reading comfort) / usability point of view, is it better to:

a) limit the screen width to, let's say, 1024px (by some CSS, like: <body style="max-width:1024px">

b) leave the body width to auto and let user decide when/if to resize the screen by himself.

Answer 1

Responsive design is really intended to allow users on non-PC devices (tablets, phones) to view the content without zooming or manipulating the screen much. It's not really relevant for PCs because of the variety of resolutions, monitor size, and even number of monitors.

Keep responsive if you know your readers are predominately on mobile devices. Those who are reading it on a PC via their browser can typical resize, zoom in/out, and even use scripting to change the font if they are struggling to read your content. Not to mention a number of PCs visitors may use an RSS feed reader rather than visit your site directly.

Good design includes a structured method for reading content such as whitespace, reasonable margins, and a font-size that isn't overly large or miniscule and hard to read.

If you have those things going on then auto-width is prefereable to fixed width where the multitude of devices can render it unreadable.