What is typographic around buttons, toolbars and other panes?

your eye needs somewhere to rest

There is a big difference between newspaper columns and web whitespace. The former are more or less uniform and easily seen (I’ve also read newspapers with explicit delineation of separate articles, and it was even better experience). The latter is just chaotic blobs of whitespace, which doesn’t usually even delineate or makes your eyes rest, it makes them lost instead. You can’t see structure, because it is so blobby. Whitespace should only surround the elements which are much more dense and “thicker” than it. Otherwise it will blend into them dissolving any structure.

I agree with these typography principles when they are applied to things that should be read from top to bottom and the entirety of the content actually consumed as a whole. There's just many circumstances that it is not appropriate and I would say an encyclopedia entry is not one of them. I want to be able to scan a lot of content without having to change pages to find where I want to start reading from. That and people are really abusing the modern typography principle to get me to scroll more and 'engage' rather than just convey the information in a nice way (most news sites and recipe sites are egregious) that I'm starting to get turned off by the style for the web even though it's based in good reasoning. For print it's still fine because you are also limited and also it's often a two-column layout which is still pretty efficient for scanning for key words or phrases while being easy to read. 'Above the fold' used to mean something but in current web so much content wants to apply these principles but also wants me to scroll ten miles get to the actual point of the content and it feels really disrespectful to me as the reader.