The state of typography on the web: still awful.
by Robert Mohns - December 14, 2007 / 4:33pm View more articles
Here's a pathological case of typography on the web:
Justified:
Justification without hyphenation is like taxation without representation.
(If you're reading this on the home page, it won't make sense until you click the Read More link. Sorry.)
Justification, as you can see, is just a disaster. Not only is there no hyphenation, there's no kerning or letterspacing or anything that would help the text look better.
The W3 Consortium's CSS3 draft includes some spacing rules in the draft spec, but as demonstrated in Glenn Fleishman's Hands on with Kindle article on that device's typographic deficiencies, word spacing alone isn't enough:
Without hyphenation, it's still pretty bad.
The W3 working group is attempting to address hyphenation in CSS 3, but it's still largely undefined and frankly my hopes aren't high unless the spec mandates a hyphenation dictionary for each supported language.
The best we can get today is to not use justification— respect the limits of the technology instead of fighting them. Frustrating, but sometimes that's what design choice is about.
Ragged:
Justification without hyphenation is like taxation without representation.
Hiring: We’re hiring a
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