A web browser normally places as many words in a single line as will fit the width of the browser window. However, there are cases where horizontal scrolling is needed. For a large picture, table or diagram this may be worthwhile, but without special measures the rest of the web page is also affected, with long lines that can only be read by cumbersome horizontal scrolling. A web browser or Internet browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. ...

This page is very wide due to the examples below. The remainder of this entry is still readable without horizontal scrolling due to explicit use of the HTML tag for forcing a newline: <br>. This article is about HTML elements. ... In computing, a newline is a special character or sequence of characters indicating the end of a line. ...

Causes of page widening include:

• a wide image;
• a very long "word", for example Krungthepmahanakornamornratanakosinmahintarayutthayamahadilokphopnopparatrajathaniburiromudomrajaniwesmahasatharnamornphimarnavatarnsathitsakkattiyavisanukamprasit;
• a long line with the specification that the browser should not break it (for instance, use of the HTML tags <pre> or <nobr>);
• a table with many columns, in particular if columns contain a long word (the minimum width of a column is the width of the longest word in it);
• a table where the html-code specifies a large width.

Authors of web pages should realize that users: Bangkok from the Chao Phraya River at sunset, July 2004 Bangkok, (in Thai กรุงเทพฯ, กรุงเทพมหานคร, or Krung Thep, Krung Thep Mahanakhon), population 8,538,610 (1990), is the capital and largest city of Thailand. ...

• may have a lower screen resolution
• may be using a larger font
• may be viewing several pages in more than 1 window at the same time
• may be using a PDA
• may be using a mobile phone

All these may cause a wide page requiring horizontal scrolling. Palm IIIxe PDA Personal digital assistants (PDAs or palmtops) are handheld devices that were originally designed as personal organizers, but became much more versatile over the years. ...

Page widening by trolls

Page widening is an Internet troll on many message boards and forums, for example, Slashdot. This form of troll causes a web page to widen to a ridiculous width, to the point where one cannot read the text without constantly scrolling left and right. Wikipedia itself appears to be affected by page widening, at least on the Safari, Mozilla and Opera web browsers. In the context of the Internet, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory messages intended to cause a disruption in discourse. ... Slashdot (frequently abbreviated as /.) is a popular technology-related website, updated many times daily with articles that are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. ... Slashdot trolling phenomena make up a large subset of the bizarre and complex subculture found on the popular technology website Slashdot. ...

The first true page widening was an accident. Someone posted a UNIX directory listing that looked something like this: Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...

.foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on .foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on .foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on .foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on .foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on .foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on .foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on .foo .bar .dir .bin .etc .and .on .and .on

A now-infamous troll by the name of Klerck used this little trick to make trolls such as: Kevin Ealy (more popularly known as Kevin Klerck or simply Klerck) (1982 – March 8, 2005), was an Internet persona who was active as a troll on several popular websites, most notably Slashdot, Shacknews and Squabble. ...

.i .like .wide .pages .dont .you .like .wide .pages .and .on .and .on .i .like .wide .pages .dont .you .like .wide .pages .and .on .and .on .i .like .wide .pages .dont .you .like .wide .pages .and .on .and .on .i .like .wide .pages .dont .you .like .wide .pages .and .on .and .on .i .like .wide .pages .dont .you .like .wide .pages .and .on .and .on .i .like .wide .pages .dont .you .like .wide .pages .and .on .and .on .i .like .wide .pages .dont .you .like .wide .pages .and .on .and .on .i

Slashdot implemented a fix for this page widening, but only after a considerable time had passed. One possible reason for the delay was that the exploit only affected Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers, which are proprietary, and Slashdot supports open source/free software. Specifically, Internet Explorer's word-wrap code would not break a line before a word starting with a period and would place all the words on one line and thus widen the page. The "alternative" proprietary browser, Opera, was not affected. Internet Explorer, abbreviated IE or MSIE is a proprietary web browser made by Microsoft and currently available as part of Microsoft Windows. ... Netscape Navigator, also known simply as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that was widely used. ... Proprietary software is a term used to describe software designed, coded, and owned by a defined person, organization or group of organizations. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed. ... Opera is a cross-platform internet suite consisting of: Web browser Email and news client News aggregator Address book IRC client Download manager Opera is in active development by Opera Software of Oslo, Norway and its core layout engine (Presto) is licensed by business partners such as Adobe and is...

This exploit relies on the fact that, when properly implemented, some characters "prohibit line break before" them, as per the Unicode specification [1]. A fix to this problem also exists for phpBB [2]. phpBB is a popular free and open source forum system using the PHP scripting language and supporting a variety of database management systems including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Microsoft Access and, with modification, Oracle [1]. Besides the database support, some of phpBBs greatest advantages are: A templating system designed with...

Less than a week later, a new widening troll appeared:

. That widener was also fixed, by a filter that automatically inserts a space into postings after a certain number of consecutive characters. This is a source of constant frustration to users who post working URLs or segments of code that are automatically broken when they hit submit. (However, this filter does not affect the contents of Slashdot's link tags; because they do not appear on screen, they cannot widen the page. The filter does not touch them, and they link properly.)

Recently, a new exploit has been discovered, known as the "WWWidener", which still worked in July 2004:

• WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW