Re: [css3-text] proposed value for text-align: no-justify

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 2:01 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> A lot of this depends on language, too.  Hyphenation is much more commonly
> used in printed work in Russian than in English.  I just looked around and
> the typical book I have in English maybe hyphenates once per page.

Whereas hyphenation isn't used at all in Hebrew (or at least I've
never seen it in my life), possibly because the lack of vowel letters
translates to a shorter average word length.  Ten letters is an
extremely long Hebrew word, except for loanwords, but this brief
English post of yours contains at least three words of more than ten
letters ("hyphenation", "hyphenates", "algorithms").  I'd guess that
for languages with very long words (German? maybe Russian too?), not
hyphenating can be painful with shortish line lengths even for
non-justified text.

It's an interesting exercise to compare these three pages with your
window at half the screen width, with ragged margins and with
justified margins (javascript:document.body.style.textAlign =
'justify';void(0);):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Even with justified margins and quite small screen widths, there's not
much unsightly space in the Hebrew article.  The English one looks
okay with ragged margins in a narrow window, but is pretty ugly if you
justify.  The German one has an extremely ragged right edge on narrow
screens even without justification, and looks terrible with
justification.

So just interpreting "justify" as "start" isn't a good idea for all languages.

Received on Sunday, 17 October 2010 18:47:51 UTC