Why not just use the Knuth-Plass algorithm as implemented in <a href="http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/</a>?
For subtitles and ledes, or really anything larger than the main body text, I actually prefer the <br/> solution. It's important not only to break in a pleasing shape, but also to break at grammatically-sensible points. So it's better to say:<p><pre><code> Take the blue car
to the shop
</code></pre>
vs<p><pre><code> Take the blue
car to the shop
</code></pre>
or<p><pre><code> Take the blue car to
the shop</code></pre>
This is a very legitimate addition to CSS. I bet we will see it in a future release. It makes a lot of sense for headings. I hope it will not get abused for other text blocks (but I am sure it will).
Chrome still doesn't support CSS3 hyphenation. I wish they would, because it has a huge impact in web typography. <a href="http://caniuse.com/css-hyphens" rel="nofollow">http://caniuse.com/css-hyphens</a>
I long for something that would just wrap all big paragaphs of text at 70-ish characters without hacking at element widths (I've tried user stylesheets, scripts... nothing satisfactory). If this were implemented, I imagine it would be easier to do that.<p>(For example, the first line of the first paragraph of the post renders as 134 characters on my screen. Maybe I am just old, but I find this hard to read.)
The Knuth optimal balancing algorithm is implemented in C in the Gnu Core Utilities program "fmt" -- see <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/</a> -- and is plenty fast enough for a browser to render text.
Yes, the website is ironically displaying text in an inconvenient way for a bunch of users.<p>But as for the content itself: why not just use left align justify? I understand that justify <i>asymmetrically</i> inserts spacing to apply a balanced center throughout, but is this <i>really</i> an issue? In what context are users so hypersensitive to readability issues that they need the justify spacing to not only balance the entire text but evenly balance each space within the text in reference to one another?<p>Pardon me for not finding this significant. I just think it's a bit anal when we have a solution already.
Ugh, I really hate newspapers and the like that stretch out words and letters randomly just to have it make a perfect block. Random spacing to meet your criteria of prettiness does not improve readability. This person centers too much is his problem, I think. Just left align, read down the page with every line starting in the same spot, stop when done. Yay. Most web readers don't even read every word anyway, they skim, and you are producing something anti-skimmable by not keeping a nice solid left line where all the text starts wherever possible.
The simplest solution to a similar problem (a single hanging word in a headline) that I've seen is to replace the 'space' between the last two works with an &nbsp; This forces the last two words to stay together as a unit. It can be automated with a simple piece of ECMAScript.
Wouldn't it be easier and give you more editing control to just put text in a <pre> element? Seems like it would be hard to algorithmically determine what will visually look good
Lovely idea. One might also consider the special case of two centered lines, where many have an aesthetic desire for the first to be longer than the second.