tag.
Now it seems that if you don’t specify any of these, the text does NOT run off the page. Have browsers become more sophisticated and use their own automatic formatting if none is specified or is there some other reason?
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### Author:  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2004, 7:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/simple-html-design-question/258745/2 "2004-08-07T07:25:13Z")
Yes.
Each new browser version tries to make the browsing experience closer to what you’d expect, instead of being impractically absurd.
The problems start when each way they approach the same non-w3c-standard idea they do it slightly differently, and website designers have to anticipate each of the browser’s particular quirks caused by this proprietary code.
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### Author:  [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2004, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/simple-html-design-question/258745/3 "2004-08-07T14:40:17Z")
I don’t know what you could mean by “run off the page”. Do you mean, that lines of text don’t word-wrap to avoid text going past the right margin?
If so, you are hugely mistaken. The very earliest browsers on up have always done automatic word wrap. It’s only idiot web page designers who assume everyone is viewing the page on a 1365x459 screen and specify text area sizes that have this problem.
If you _don’t make **any** assumptions_ about the size of the screen the viewer has, then everything will be okay as far as text.
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### Author:  [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2004, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/simple-html-design-question/258745/4 "2004-08-07T16:02:13Z")
The earliest browsers would automatically word-wrap everything, _as long as they thought they were looking at HTML_. If a document was sent as plain text, then most browsers would only obey the actual newlines in the text, which is technically correct but highly annoying.
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### Author:  [@wolf\_meister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolf_meister)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2004, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/simple-html-design-question/258745/5 "2004-08-07T18:32:41Z")
Yes, by text “running off the page” I meant that the text did not word-wrap properly. It’s been a long while since I saw one of those pages, but I think you know what I am talking about. Sometimes a page will have one line that extends _horizontally_ about 20 or 30 _screens_ more than all the others. That’s why I thought browsers changed (as GuanoLad said). Of course there could have been a serious outbreak of good web design on the Internet.