After the printing press, but before the Internet, justified text was actually the norm. Every book, newspaper and magazine had justified text. But after hundreds of years, text justification has finally fallen out of favor. We can only speculate about the reason.

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bregma 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree. Fully justified text was the norm for narrow-column media such as newspapers and some magazines. Ragged-right was the norm for wider media such as printed books because, for physiological reasons discovered over centuries, it's easier to keep your place in long paragraphs. Most web media are narrow-column format, so tend to be fully justified. Whether that's good or not tends to be a matter of how one is consuming the matter: a high-pixel-density phone at 15 cm vs. a 1080p monitor at 45 cm call for different presentation for optimal readability.

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Sharlin 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Ragged-right was the norm for wider media such as printed books

What? I'm pretty sure that if I pick any book in my shelf, it's going to be justified.

> Most web media are narrow-column format, so tend to be fully justified.

What #2? 99% of web media is ragged-right, the biggest reason being that it's the default, and that browsers have terrible line-wrapping and historically had no support for hyphenation. And justified text gets worse the shorter the lines are, because there are fewer options on where to insert newlines, leading to large spaces between words. Also, good justification requires fine-grained word spacing control, which doesn't work well with traditional low-resolution displays.

My MSc thesis advisor recently told that apparently thesis documents should be submitted with ragged-right lines these days because it makes them easier to read for dyslexics; while it makes sense, it must be a quite new guideline.

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misternintendo 4 days ago | parent [-]

ragged right became the web norm because browsers lacked good hyphenation, making justified text look gappy. In print it works fine, but online ragged right tends to be easier to read.

	▲	cubefox 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		But CSS has hyphenation for quite a while now. It's probably not worse than the hyphenation in Microsoft Word during the 1990s.

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FrostKiwi 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My blog's style has Sakura.css [1] as its base, which keeps the paragraphs narrow on wide displays, limited 684 CSS pixels to aid readability. The justify text-style was a choice by me. Now I really wonder whether that hurt readability.

[1] https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura

	▲	cubefox 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Enabling automatic CSS hyphenation would reduce the often rather wide word gaps in justified text.

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npteljes 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I looked at random, recent printed media around me, and it's all still justified.

On displays, readability works out differently, and that's why I speculate this has changed. For example, printed media uses serif fonts to aid readability, but on displays, sans-serif works better, especially on lower resolutions.