Add CSS3 Hyphenation to Twenty Eleven

[sksmatt]

Yesterday’s release of Firefox 6 and last month’s release of Safari 5.1 on OS X Lion mean that two browsers now support ​CSS 3 hyphenation.

Turning on hyphenation is easy. Only needs this rule:

p {
    -webkit-hyphens: auto;
    -moz-hyphens: auto;
    hyphens: auto;
}

[toscho]

Could you point out why this is useful and which problem it will solve?

In languages with longer average words (Finnish, German) we would risk too many hyphenated line endings. I think this is rather a child theme territory.

[sksmatt]

Good points. Might be mostly a design preference. This is what I have:

Replying to toscho:

Could you point out why this is useful and which problem it will solve?

Extracts from [Font Deck ​http://blog.fontdeck.com/post/9037028497/hyphens]

Why Hyphenation?

"[...] Justified text (where words line up on both the left and right margins) generally looks terrible on the web because ‘rivers’ of white are introduced through the text as words are spaced apart to make lines touch both margins. These rivers make reading harder as the eye is drawn down them instead of along the line of text. If justification is not applied then lines of text can still appear overly ‘ragged’ at their ends. This tends to prohibit use of narrow measures (short lines). Hyphenation helps alleviate both these issues."

In languages with longer average words (Finnish, German) we would risk too many hyphenated line endings. I think this is rather a child theme territory.

"It works for all languages which have a hyphenation dictionary. You will need to specify the language of the text somewhere, either in an HTTP header or by using the lang="en" or lang="fr", etc attribute where hyphenation is required."

[toscho]

TwentyEleven doesn’t use justified text. And it shouldn’t for a long, long time.

It works is not the same as it is aesthetically acceptable, that’s why I asked which problem this would solve. A child theme using justified text can add the hyphenation rules too. Left aligned text like in TwentyEleven doesn’t create rivers of white space.

[johnbillion]

I agree with toscho. Hyphenation is intended to improve justified text and adds very little to left-aligned text, especially with longer line length. Best left to a child theme.

[sksmatt]

Thanks for the feedback guys, will set as invalid/close.