The Debate on Justifying Text for Web Readability and Hyphenation

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Design experts say: Never justify text on web. It‘s bad for readability. Yet in CSS we have hyphens: auto; for ages, and it does the job so well. Was not justification and hyphenation the whole point in the print industry to maximize readability? Once I started justifying content on paragraphs, I can never look back. Here is one example.

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6 comments

Emily M.
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I'm a big fan of how that looks, and reads! I wonder why it supposedly causes readability issues?
Zlatko
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Thank, Emily. Well, not specifically for this site, but in general I‘ve been reading experts for years say to never justify text on web.
Zlatko
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I think it‘s mostly because some long words (especially in languages like German) might disrupt the reading flow by creating big gaps on a line of text. CSS can not control justification so precisely like controlling it in InDesign, let‘s say.
Anton M.
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It was used in newspapers because they used lots of short columns, so the right edge acted as a clear separator line. I also think back in the day the browser rendered the justification terrible... so had big spaces in words. Your site and typography look lovely, so I might experiment a little with it...
Zlatko
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Thanks. Yeah, my aim is to encourage other designers to begin using justified text in rich-text elements in combination with hyphenation. The only drawback would be mobile screens. But in that case, a simple media query reverting the alignment to left would fix it.
Zlatko
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Also, drop caps. We forgot about them. Most browsers, I believe, support it by now.