licentious radio

Sunday, May 25, 2003
[9:22:49 PM]

Further adventures of ....

For those of you just tuning in, licentious radio's NO JUSTIFICATION in HTML campaign is sweeping the web.

Why? Because justifying text without hyphenation typically leaves uneven. gaping holes between words, where a single, small space should be. Even though the right edge is nicely even, the gaping holes and running rivers (a hole at about the same place in several lines) make reading difficult. If you intend for people to read the text on your website, making it harder to read than normal is a bad idea.

Of course we can't say X without pondering the opposite of X. When could you justify text? Newspapers get away with it because of hyphenation and narrow columns. We postulate that with sufficiently narrow columns, the eye doesn't scan along the line as much, so irregular and large spaces between words wouldn't be such a big problem.

Not content to leave well-enough alone, we had to hack. Putting soft hyphens () in text is easy. Modern browsers will at least ignore the  -- we thought. Sigh. There's no end to the blundering of browsers. (We're complaining, not accusing. Browsers are hard and making browsers fast was harder, and all of this would have been fixed long since had the development pace kept up.)

WinIE 4+ will use  to hyphenate. Mozilla ignores them gracefully. Alas, MacIE 5x (on one Mac with OS X, anyway) displays a U with some queer accent for every .

Not content to leave bad enough alone, we hacked onward: write a script in Javascript to go through and remove the soft hyphen characters. (We had thought Javascript was finally stable enough to be useful....) Alas. Our simple-minded hack freaked MacIE out completely -- throwing margins off and twisting the font-family. (Why in the world didn't they test this?)

Reluctantly, we abandon the concept. (The coolest bit was we got to align headings to the right. You don't get to do that every day.)

Fact is, WinIE's hyphenation was pretty bad -- not hyphenating often enough -- and our view is that hyphens should hang -- be placed just beyond the right margin -- which WinIE doesn't do.

This design had very short lines... we might try again in a design where the lines are a more normal length and the server is smart enough only to give s to WinIE browsers.