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by johnisgood 2115 days ago
What is wrong with it? Works no matter the width. I like it. What do not you like about it? Serious question.
6 comments

In print, full justification of text is done by more than just varying word spacing. It also involves varying tracking (letter spacing) on per-line basis, hyphenation and even very subtle character geometry adjustments.

Typesetting software does a lot of that magic automatically and further allows easy manual adjustments to make the copy look even and readable without awkward spacing, “corridors” etc. Browser handling and latest CSS capabilities don’t even come close.

Having studied typography and worked in typesetting, I can’t imagine using full justification of body copy on the web.

It's a pretty terrible read on my mobile phone. The typeface is very thin and combined with the varying tracking and massive leading it's just hard to read.

Firdt off, the maximum line length should be between 50 and 80 characters roughly, not as many words as your display fits.

Justification instead of hyphens is also abhorrent and I don't know any justification (hehhehh) for why one should use it at all even. I know it's traditional in legal copy and sometimes in news papers but with proper hyphenation (which is possible with CSS these days) I would strongly recommend never to justify anything on the web if one can avoid it.

It’s hard to read. The space between words is not consistent and often too large.
Also the author hasn't turned on hyphenation. It's a "rule" that when you justify text you should use hyphenation. If not, the spacing between words will be very uneven as can be seen in the text.

The author should try adding language to the HTML tag (`<html lang=en-US>`) and setting `hyphens: auto` in CSS. Still hyphenation in browser is of a lower quality than you will find in a book with good typesetting.

I played around with the page and, to me, left-aligned text looks much better than justified text.

Especially on narrow devices, the inconsistency of the lengths of white space is severe. Subjectively, I feel dizzy looking at the paragraphs on this site via my phone.
- justified paragraphs have been removed - html lang eng has been added - hyphens auto has been added