Design experts say: <i>Never justify text on web. It‘s bad for readability. </i>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.
I'm a big fan of how that looks, and reads! I wonder why it supposedly causes readability issues?
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.
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.
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...
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 <i>left</i> would fix it.
