It's funny, I recently published an HTML5 book, and can say that in the book itself this problem is largely caused by the publisher and their space contraints. So much copy text and code samples get cut just to "make it fit" in pages divisible by 16. Pain.
However code examples that appear on the book's site obviously have no such constraint, and as such may just be formatted as per the author's personal taste. Either way, no one is happy :)
Speaking of the book itself, it's not bad. Though I thought they glossed over the Canvas too quickly, and could have spent more time on helper libraries, like jQuery, etc.
For my book, 80 characters was the line max. It was difficult for a few JavaScript things, but it just meant breaking one-liners apart into two liners, or breaking long script includes appropriately.
Hey, I have your book! "The Pragmatic Programmers: HTML5 and CSS3" right? :)
You were lucky because you consistently had the entire page width. For mine, because the book's formatting was pre-defined, the column width was variable depending on content type. I could have anywhere between 20 to 65 chars for code. The only place I had control was in the screenshots of code in Vim, but even Production decided to scale those down to make it fit.
I can't imagine writing for another publisher after hearing about all the awful things that happen to people's books. I'm very lucky. Sounds like you had a really rough time. :(
Honestly, it was a great learning experience and I'm glad to have been given the opportunity. After two books (the first one on Perl last year) I toyed with the idea of turning this into a career, but financial reality set in :)
Oh, yea! You were at code camp! I didn't make it this year, but you did some pretty good talks at the one last year. I won an e-book copy of that book, then my nook broke.
However code examples that appear on the book's site obviously have no such constraint, and as such may just be formatted as per the author's personal taste. Either way, no one is happy :)
Speaking of the book itself, it's not bad. Though I thought they glossed over the Canvas too quickly, and could have spent more time on helper libraries, like jQuery, etc.