Amazingly, we are still sometimes asked to do this; although rarely, admittedly. Most people have done enough web browsing to have absorbed the fact that text justification just doesn't happen on the web.
But it seems to have passed some people by.
So why is it taboo on the web?
To understand the main reason, you have to appreciate that websites are composed purely and simply of coding; nothing else. If I am working on a print document, the software I use is very sophisticated and allows me to alter the most minute details of the type itself, the spaces between each letter (on an individual basis if required!) and hyphenation. This means that, although justified text will look odd at first, I can work with it and tweak it and detail it until the copy looks perfect.
This way I can avoid 'rivers of white' and other problems associated with justified text.
We do not have this luxury on the web. Viewwers will see, and will be distracted by those white lines which worm their way down the pages and by those bizarre white spaces between the words themselves.
'Unrefined' justified text is extremely difficult to read and it virtually uncontrollable in HTML coding. The first way we deal with unwieldy justfied text in a print document, is to add soft hypens to artificially shorten longer works which find themselves on the end of lines. This gets rid of quite a few of those ugly white spaces.
However, the coding required to create a soft hyphen does not work in all browsers, making the justified text even more ugly. Also, the excessive coding required means that the page will take longer to load.
So I have no idea why anyone would ever ask for justified copy on the web. Ugly, cumbersome, will look even worse on about 50% of computers, creates slow-loading pages ... but it's 'neater' ... is that it????
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.