Typography, hyphens and CSS3

At last! Hyphens are here. It’s a small step for the CSS3 specification and a huge step for typography.

As the blog of Fontdeck tells us, Safari 5 and Firefox 6 already support hyphens. And it’s quite simple:

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

Until now the best solution was hyphenator.js, which brings Javascript to the game. A JavaScript approach for such issues is not a priority as long as it concerns me. Now, with CSS3, we can reach a more delightful destination. Actually, I enabled hyphens in this website and it looks cool.

Illiterate people still aim to justify text. Which is not good of course because full justification forces words to reach the end of a line. This way words change their inner distance and the so called “rivers” begin to emerge and make text hard to read.

CSS3 and hyphens is a painkiller. Yay!