Re: <ALIGN=JUSTIFY>

Abigail (abigail@tungsten.gn.iaf.nl)
Fri, 17 May 1996 19:22:43 +0200 (MET DST) 

From: Abigail <abigail@tungsten.gn.iaf.nl>
Message-Id: <199605171722.TAA21454@tungsten.gn.iaf.nl>
Subject: Re: <ALIGN=JUSTIFY>
To: www-html@w3.org
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 19:22:43 +0200 (MET DST)
In-Reply-To: <9605170949.ZM19106@aob.org> from "Shawn Steele" at May 17, 96 09:49:51 am

Shawn Steele wrote:
++ 
++ Regarding the pros and cons of JUSTIFY:
++ 
++ I recently was responsible for designing a print brochure and notice
++ that justified text looks pretty bad in some circumstances,
++ particularly when the width of the column is narrow.  Since we can't
++ control how wide the user's brower is, we don't know how bad it may
++ look.  For example:
++                       
++ | ******************** This paragraph |
++ | * Img align=left   * is very narrow |
++ | *                  * in      width. |
++ | *                  * Browsers   can |
++ | ******************** have different |
++ | sizes depending on individual users |
++ | preferences.                        |
++ 
++ (where the | are the edge of the browser window)  As you can see, "in
++ width." didn't work very well.  This could be helped by adjusting the
++ various spacings, but still it is pretty hard to stretch a few words a
++ long distance and have it look good.  In print media, the designer can
++ knows what the end result will be, so its not too difficult to work
++ around these kinds of problems.  In the above example the word order
++ could be rearranged or something to make it fit.  Of course hyphenation
++ would help, but you could still end up with
++ pretty s
++ -illy h-
++ yphenat-
++ ions.

Justifying text might not be very easy, it isn't exactly new or
rocket science. (La)TeX has been doing it for more than a decade,
just like many other packages. Sure, the situations pointed out
will occur, but they are exceptions. Likewise, with the align
attribute on <img> we can have:

| ******************** This paragraph |
| * Img align=left   * is very narrow |
| *                  * in width and   |
| ******************** one word too   |
| long.                               |

Very ugly, yet not a reason not to allow the align attribute on
images.

Furthermore, 'align = justify' should been seen as a suggestion,
a smart browser would ignore it in certain cases, for instance
when the current width is too small (relative to the font size).

I think that if one allows the align attribute, 'justify' should
be a valid option. 


Abigail

-- 
<URL: http://www.edbo.com/abigail/>