CSS was originally meant for styling after all, right? Let’s step back from the programming-related concepts, and turn again to the design element of CSS. Aside from functionality in coding, some of the ideas floating around relate to functionality in design. Let’s look at a few below, some of which already have solutions.
Advanced Hyphenation Techniques
With increasing attention paid to typography in the last few years, hyphenation has become a priority for many people. Well-designed websites hyphenate the text in areas where it is important to the layout so that the text does not have to be constantly altered. This improves alignment and better organizes the overall design.
Without tools, though, bodies of content are left with jagged edges and sometimes strange spacing. This is understandable, given the history of typography, but as we move into the future, we will probably want to standardize hyphenation and, more importantly, make it easier to implement.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do something like this?
- p {
- font: 8pt Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif;
- text-align: hyphenate;
- }
No need to make it more complicated, either for future authors of CSS or for us as designers and developers. Because we identify a Web page’s language at the top of an XHTML document, it would be easy for the CSS to identify the language in which to hyphenate.
