Re: Orphan control in CSS

One hesitation I have concerning the current proposal is that the
description in the referenced wikipedia page is

  A word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at
  the end of a paragraph.  Orphans result in too much white space between
  paragraphs or at the bottom of a page.

The "or very short line" part and the sole rationale given for avoiding
such orphans relates not to the number of words but rather their total
length.  It might be that typographers would accept ending a paragraph
with the line "uncharacteristically." on a short measure, but would
reject ending a paragraph ending with a line consisting of the last two
or three words of "as it is." on a wide measure.

If so, then perhaps the property should be based on length, and perhaps
it should accept percentage values that refer to the width [or inline
progression dimension] of the containing block.

pjrm.

Received on Friday, 6 January 2012 07:42:41 UTC