I‘m often wondering why relatively few websites justify their text to fill out the complete screen.<p>Is this a matter of preference, or are there reasons for this? Is non-justified text more accessible? Or maybe because of smaller screens?
It’s not the default, which may play a big part. In addition, justification is an awful way to align text[1], making the composition uglier and harder to read, even if you don’t consciously notice it.<p>There are ways to work around those issues (all of them hacks: deforming characters and spaces in between), but even most professional design software doesn’t support the full range of features. Last I checked, Adobe Illustrator didn’t support that kind of granularity (though Adobe Indesign did) and neither did web browsers.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Problems_with_justification" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Problems...</a>
My guess is that it's simply a tech challenge. Justifying text seems non-trivial, especially if hyphenation is used (which I believe is typically the case in print, otherwise you get huge spaces).<p>According to caniuse `text-align: justify` is still not widely supported [1]. At this point, with how long people have had to get used to non-justified text online, it probably wouldn't be commonly used even after it becomes widely supported.<p>The specs for the justify property illustrate some of the challenges in implementation [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://caniuse.com/css-text-justify" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/css-text-justify</a><p>[2] <a href="https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#text-justify-property" rel="nofollow">https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#text-justify-property</a>
My understanding is that justified text is harder to read as in order to create the justification, uneven spaces are generated between the words which disrupts the flow of your eye.<p>Additionally, just like it's harder for the eye to make out a word in all caps due to greater regularity in the image, it's also likely harder to distinguish differences in a paragraph if it's all a 'block' to the reader.<p>I'd imagine some people rely more heavily on the shapes of words rather than the letters or spelling itself. And then this heuristic might also carry through into the shape of a paragraph.
It’s because the primitive line-breaking algorithm used by browers, combined with the lack of hypenation in most cases, leads to a poor result, especially in narrow columns. Look up “greedy line breaking”.