Re: [xwiki-devs] [Colibri] Cleanup Changes

Hi, On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Ecaterina Valica <valicac(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: I understood that already. Since the rendering creates a new paragraph each time a new line is created, it still means that almost all text will be justified. I understand that. As I stated it above, the rendering / WYSIWYG create new paragraphs for virtually all of the content that is inputted on a wiki page thus most of the content on a page will use the justified form. As for "text usually looks better when justified", I disagree. Most browsers handle justification poorly and display big blocks of white between words. They create "rivers of white" between words that don't look good at all. From http://www.webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.3/: "Effective justification of text can only be achieved if long words are hyphenated. HTML and CSS 2 do not have any provision for automatic hyphenation and current Web browsers support, even for manual hyphenation, is poor. So don’t justify text on the web." Justify works well when there's a lot of content on a page and there's a content flow (for books and long articles for instance). However most wiki pages are not books and hold technical content and relatively short lines of text. This means that in many cases we would end up with one justified line and then right underneath it an aligned-left line. This will look weird. Last but not least, rather than "text usually looks good" I'd like to see an explanation + examples of pages showing how justifying text will make XWiki easier to use for its users (will it make reading faster? will it make pages look more consistent and thus easier to grok by users?). Until then I'm not convinced it's a good change. To summarize: in most cases justify won't bring much value and it's less flexible and causes more issues than align left. I won't change my mind unless I see how it makes reading more effective on a production wiki with "real life" text. Guillaume -- Guillaume Lerouge Product Manager - XWiki SAS Skype: wikibc Twitter: glerouge http://guillaumelerouge.com/