Text-align - left or justify?
Maybe I am biased by the many years spent reading the Sunday paper after my old man got done with it. Maybe I have a keen eye for quality design and superior content when they come together in a perfect mix of design and content. Whatever madness it is that compels me, I notice when a site design uses left versus justify for the CSS property text-align. I struggle to pinpoint exactly what it is about left-justified content that drives me nuts, or why exactly I feel so at home with newspaper styled designs. I do know this: setting text-align to justify fills out paragraphs and provides for cleaner lines in a quality design.
I am also astutely aware that my preference applies only to content that stretches over two lines. The reason behind that is simple: the css property “justify” does not come into effect until after the paragraph has extended into a second line. Once the content spills over, the magical properties of CSS stretch the words in the previous line(s) to proportionately fill the entire line with text.
Now, some designers do not like having an uneven amount of space between words. But I defy them to show a better method to align both the left and right edge of the text using some other form of CSS trickery or bloated imagery. Until then, I will stick to my roots and render content in a format that’s easy on my eyes and brings back fond childhood memories of eating Spiderman cereal and watching Alf.
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