I found it both cool and scary to learn that there’s some JavaScript that can automagically hyphenate your typography on the web. Me, I’ve found a relatively narrow column width (380 pixels, ~65 characters per line) plus text-align:justify
to be sufficient for my purposes (via Tim Bray)
Scary? Why?
I dunno, I find it “scary” to imagine JavaScript transforming my content on the browser. What if it hyphenated a blockquote or a block of programming code. I’m guessing it’s smart enough to avoid such things (if semantically marked up), but it just strikes me as risky for questionable benefit.
I see.
Well, the whole web is scary. You can never be sure how your content shows up on the client (think of proxies shrinking down images, of user defined css and so on).
BTW there’s a bunch of tags that are not hyphenated (<code> is one of them). <blockquote> and <q> are hyphenated by default, but there are lots of configuration options…
Justification works well for english texts. In german texts we have longer compound words:
Blocksatz funktioniert gut in englischsprachigen Texten. In deutschsprachigen Texten gibt’s längere Wortzusammensetzungen.
Looks ugly, huh?