While doing something else, I ran across this and may it be worth a try for the width problem when someone types in more characters than you'd like... add a new rule to the div that holds the content for the comments as this article suggests:

BEGIN ARTICLE SNIPPET
If you want to set a maximum width on your main content, you can do this by adding a new rule : "#content { max-width: 36em; }".

Although IE browsers will ignore this rule, other standards compliant browsers will not allow the content area to go wider that 36em - keeping the line length to a comfortable width.