Re: To Justify or Not To Justify

by Jens Brueckmann <lists(at)j-a-b.net>

Date:	Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:02:34 +0100
To:	Judith Kallos <hwg-lgmanager(at)hwg.org>, "hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org" <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
References:	mindspring
	todo: View Thread, Original

In my opinion the big problem with justifying text for screen display is 
the differing screen sizes in combination with differing word length.

One might be able to justify text perfectly for one display only 
discovering that is does not work well for others, especially larger ones 
as intolerable gaps appear between words that make reading the text very 
hard.

Some sort of solution for long words would be using the soft hyphen, 
&#173; (&shy;). [1]
Another one could be using preformatting and non-proportional fonts.

But as problems may occur when using the former and nobody really wants to 
write lest read large passages of monospaced text I believe that 
justification is no good idea for web pages at the moment. Advancing 
technology might provide us with acceptable solutions in the future.


Cheers,


jens


[1]This character is inserted into longer words to break them at the end 
of lines, inserting a hyphen. This sounds good but poses a couple of 
problems. The first one is, that not all browsers support this character - 
Opera and Internet Explorer do, but Geckos (Mozilla, Firethingies, 
Netscape) do not.
The second really big problem is that in different languages hyphenation 
may lead to adding, substracting or changing characters, like in the 
german word "Zucker" (sugar), which SHOULD be divided into "Zuk-ker". 
Actually, browser do not know about these changes and divide this word 
into "Zuc-ker".

-- 
Jens Brueckmann
http://www.j-a-b.net/

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