Option list descriptions should wrap

[andreasvc]

For the option name it is useful to disable wrapping, but multiline descriptions would be nicer with wrapping, because now they appear with a horizontal scrollbar:

[snide]

It's just the product of the table itself. Since I have no way to know how many cells or how much content someone is going to throw into these things I had to make a compromise and add the scrollbar. Not only is there a fixed max width to the readible area, but on mobile there needed to be some solution.

Unfortunately this means that all table styling in general is mediocre, but it at least is readable in all cases. Allowing wraps here, but not in other areas would cause trouble.

[andreasvc]

Having to scroll is the opposite of readable IMHO. I'm curious why wrapping needs to be disallowed in the first place (the maximum width is not the problem).

[snide]

I'd agree with you if there weren't thousands of people using this in countless ways. Designing with docutils as a base is the equivalent of trying to assume what somebody is going to output with frontpage. Personally, I wouldn't even use tables in most of the situations they do.

Documentation tends to have tables that have LOTS of table cells in them. Combined with the max width, you get tables that end up with only a word or two per line if they wrap. That is more unreadable than a scrollbar. At least with this, I know the columns will line up and be readable, and be readable against any screen. You can probably dig up old bugs where I had to fix the exact opposite of this bug.

Again. It's not a solution I like very much, but you have to consider how people use rst in the different ways it allows. If I was designing for a single documentation set things would be very different, but I'm trying to get to the best baseline possible for a variety of docs.