Re: justification...

Casey Reagan says:

> On Tue, 12 Mar 1996, Abigail wrote:

> > You, Christian Gerard wrote:
> > ++ Don't you think that <JUST> is a lot easier then <TAG ALIGN = "JUSTIFY">?

> > > No. For the same reason there isn't <right> and <left>, 
> > <p align = "right">, <h1 align = "left">, <table align = "justify">,
> > <div align = "center">, etc. Why four new tags if one attribute
> > suffices?

> And I believe that actually default alignment is left. 

Where does it say that, exactly?

> I am not sure why someone would want to align all of their objects to 
> the right.  This could  effectively push them off the screen.

No, it would push them so they finish at the right hand edge of the screen.


> Also, the <center> tag already  exists. 

Exists where ;-)  not in HTML. <foo align="center"> has been proposed,
so it could be said to exist (and Netscape has supported this form for a 
long time). Aligning a group of otherwise unrelated items has also been
proposed, using <div align="center"> and Netscape 2.0 supports this too.

> So, this really only a proposal for one tag.

Just one more tag ... however the functionality has already been proposed, so
why seek to duplicate it?

> I am just wondering, how much different this would be than the 
> <Blockquote> tag? Should the <just> put spaces into text in order to 
> align text with both the left and right?

Difference is that the blockquote element is used for block quotes, 
wheras an alignment attribute is used for suggesting alignment. Seems 
fairly clear.

Putting inter-word spaces into text is one way to justify it (particularly 
on text-only browsers that do not have proportionally spaced fonts). Better
quality rendering is likely to be acheived by also using subtle letter 
spacing as well, and increasing the width of spaces rather than adding 
in extra (fixed width) ones.

This is where browser vendors can differentiate themselves, by adding value. 
An extremely good browser would probably use a language-dependent 
hyphenation dictionary as well. HTML alignment attributes would just say 
what alignment was to be suggested, not how it is to be acheived.
 

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
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Received on Wednesday, 13 March 1996 09:44:48 UTC