I understand some websites are doing lots of funky stuff, but at this point the issue is on your particular client if it cannot zoom bare text correctly and smoothly. Any decent client should be able to allow you to zoom it so that you can maximize those 80 character column to the width of your phone screen in protrait mode regardless of font size and dpi.
Try it if you don't have a perfect 100% vision (20/20 this is called in USA I think?) and have a phone that fits in a normal pocket
Optimal reading width for speed/comprehension is also fewer than 80 characters afaik. I think different sources I read years ago were undecided whether it's closer to 60- or 70-character lines. Either way, rescaling when there is no ASCII art or position-dependent characters seems rather basic and <pre> disallows that
I am using prescription glasses. That is what they are for. If you are using yours and still can't read small text, you need a visit to your optiometrist and get new ones.
What about us poor slobs whose vision is less than perfect where the 80-character line is too small even when it takes up the entire width of the display? The way zooming is implemented in the mobile browsers, we must horizontally scroll back and forth for every line we read.
I don't think my glasses can correct my vision well enough to be able to read 80-char-wide text on a smartphone in portrait mode. I can't say for sure because I don't own a smartphone--partly because I worry about being able to read web pages on it without regularly resorting to the aforementioned tedious horizontal scrolling.
I always wear my glassses when I'm using my iPad, which is in landscape mode almost all the time (the exceptions being the rare apps like Uber's that won't do landscape mode).
