#How do you full justify text in html software#
#How do you full justify text in html code#

stylistic) and not an inate property of the content.

Hyphenation is a characteristic of how the content is displayed (i.e. Hyphenation is a display-time decision that should be the responsibility of the client - the client has the most information about the abilities and limitations of the display device, and the context in which the hyphenation is going to be done. I understand the problem, but forcing servers to sprinkle these throughout an entire document seems wrong on a number of levels. I hadn't heard of the '' entity before and, now that I have, I confess to being a little dismayed. It's something that needs to be in the content, not guessed at presentation time.

#How do you full justify text in html software#

Hyphenation should be left entirely in the hands of content producers, whose software should, under their watchful eye, produce documents with soft hyphens at every possible and appropriate point of hyphenation. Variations of language, proper names that look like normal words, and other issues make it impossible that browser-based hyphenation could ever work very well. Third, soft hyphens should not be a stopgap measure, but are the optimum final solution, because hyphenation is a finicky enough beast that it cannot finally be simply left in the hands of the browser to do where it thinks it will work. The entire paragraph should be spaced a bit wider to help the last line only a very poor algorithm punishes the line right before it. Very fast algorithms have existed since the 1970s that do not merely find good ways to break a paragraph into lines, but will be guaranteed to find the best way to break the entire paragraph - so that the choice of where to break the very first line can 'feel' the needs of the last lines to accommodate a long URL. Second, the idea that a long word like a URL would cause only the previous line to gain wide spaces is a signal that a terribly, terribly primitive paragraph-breaking algorithm is being used, and that - in my opinion - someone is being allowed to write presentation software who doesn't know the field. With fully justified text, by contrast, the eye can simply read to the edge of the big, visually-obvious rectangle it's scanning and not have to peer blearily in between two adjacent lines of text for exactly where the current one ends. Ragged edges impose cognitive load, because the eye has to re-discover the edge of every single line. Why would a traditionally-publishedīook forgo the tried and true technology of good-looking pages? #typography #web » 10 reactionsįirst, full justification is not merely a matter of mimicry it's a matter of usability. And I’m reading a Salman Rushdieīook published by Penguin which uses no hyphenation. Have built hyphenation into a reading device. Something I noticed right away when I first tried one out.

#How do you full justify text in html code#

The lack of hyphenationīut they also have their drawbacks: code size and execution time.īTW: it isn’t just the web that suffers from hyphen-less justification. Will appear, you shouldn’t use full justification on the web. In a single column of text in the middle of a browser window,įull justification isn’t gaining you much, and brings you pain in the form of loose lines.Įxcept in specialized cases, or where you know very clearly what type of content Text is a good echo of the right edge of the paper, or of the left edge of the next column But content on the web rarely appears in a constrained rectangle.įull justification in print is appealing partly because the justified right edge of the Books and newspapers use full justification, so we try toĭo it on the web also. I think full justification is one of those technology hold-overs: the new technology This as other non-word content appears in running text, such as function names. Occasionally URLs appear in paragraphs, and these are very large “words” thatĬompletely screw up the line before them. Here are some examples from the OpenID news for February 2008: Naturally, and they don’t have to be stretched too far.īut web browsers don’t hyphenate. By breaking words into smaller chunks, the lines can be filled more

In traditional typography, hyphenation is used to reduce the need to make loose The line of text is then “too loose”, and interrupts the flow of reading. The goal is to get an evenly filledīecause full justification involves stretching word spaces, if a line has toīe stretched too much, the spaces become wide enough to be noticeable white blobs The rectangle, something they call “color”. They care about the evenness of the type within But typographers care about more than just The straight right edge is a strong visual element on the page, and canĪdd to the controlled overall look.

Typographers use full justification to get an elegant-looking block of Full justification on the web is usually a bad idea.