Just wondering why everyone aligns the main content of their web pages to the left and not many people justify it.
I prefer to justify it to give the right side of the content a nice straight edge, like in books for example. But after noticing that not many people justify their main content I was wondering if there was a particular reason why
. Alignment....interesting.There are various reasons some people are just lazy, etc.
However some dyslexic users have issues with the white space variance between the words and the ragged right-edge can sometimes help them lock onto which line the were previously reading.Like using upper and lower case for the letters, ragged right is easier to read. I agree it "looks" better in some situations but it also look horrid when the column width is relatively small.One of the reasons justified text often does not work well with HTML is that browsers do not have hyphenation dictionaries. Therefore, if a long word just barely goes past the end of a line, it gets bumped down to the next line and the original line gets a whole bunch of spaces added between words to make it justify to the end of the line. This can look really bad plus make it harder to read.
In book publishing, they can get away with justified text because (1) they hyphenate words as needed, and (2) they can expand and contract both word and letter spacing to make lines justify without creating unsightly spacing effects.Yeah I don't justify text in narrow columns because of the stretching you mentioned that you can sometimes see in newspapers. It's pretty pointless there, I only apply it on my main content. Interesting point about people with dyslexia having difficulties Robert. That is probably the reason behind it......as well as people being lazy and sticking with the default
.I think justified text works in a couple ways. I made the body text on <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.cm-life.com">www.cm-life.com</a><!-- w --> justified (article pages) to give the main content an edge, like you mentioned above. The text column is wide enough that spaces between words remain fairly equal, and since the layout is sized in ems (the point size of a font) the layout will increase and decrease in size according to user text size settings. This prevents resized text from wrapping funny.
I also don't mind justified text for teaser text, as long as you can have 5 - 6 words per line, and keep it short.
Aside from that, I do like ragged right text for reading.
I prefer to justify it to give the right side of the content a nice straight edge, like in books for example. But after noticing that not many people justify their main content I was wondering if there was a particular reason why
. Alignment....interesting.There are various reasons some people are just lazy, etc. However some dyslexic users have issues with the white space variance between the words and the ragged right-edge can sometimes help them lock onto which line the were previously reading.Like using upper and lower case for the letters, ragged right is easier to read. I agree it "looks" better in some situations but it also look horrid when the column width is relatively small.One of the reasons justified text often does not work well with HTML is that browsers do not have hyphenation dictionaries. Therefore, if a long word just barely goes past the end of a line, it gets bumped down to the next line and the original line gets a whole bunch of spaces added between words to make it justify to the end of the line. This can look really bad plus make it harder to read.
In book publishing, they can get away with justified text because (1) they hyphenate words as needed, and (2) they can expand and contract both word and letter spacing to make lines justify without creating unsightly spacing effects.Yeah I don't justify text in narrow columns because of the stretching you mentioned that you can sometimes see in newspapers. It's pretty pointless there, I only apply it on my main content. Interesting point about people with dyslexia having difficulties Robert. That is probably the reason behind it......as well as people being lazy and sticking with the default
.I think justified text works in a couple ways. I made the body text on <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.cm-life.com">www.cm-life.com</a><!-- w --> justified (article pages) to give the main content an edge, like you mentioned above. The text column is wide enough that spaces between words remain fairly equal, and since the layout is sized in ems (the point size of a font) the layout will increase and decrease in size according to user text size settings. This prevents resized text from wrapping funny.I also don't mind justified text for teaser text, as long as you can have 5 - 6 words per line, and keep it short.
Aside from that, I do like ragged right text for reading.