Justified text on the web, at this point, is almost always a bad idea. When designing a website, it’s simple enough to not use the dreadful text-align: justify; but what is the casual browser of the World Wide Web to do?
If you are as fed up as I am with rivers of whitespace flowing through the blocks of fully justified text on the web and sweeping your attention away from the important stuff (the content!), there’s no doubt that you’ll want to take matters away from good-intentioned amateur designers and into your own hands.
Just drag this link, Unjustify, to your bookmarks toolbar. Next time you come across some justified text, you get to zap it.
Try it out
From the Heart Sutra as translated by Nalanda Translation Committee:
Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness. Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas, no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no non-attainment.
If you like this, why not stick around?
5 Comments
October 4th, 2007 at 6:52 am
[...] be IMO) would be so handy… and now Joe Lencioni has come up with a simple bookmarklet, name Unjustify, that does just [...]
May 15th, 2008 at 3:53 am
Do you have a tool to make enourmous red text and headings smaller on other peoples websites?
May 15th, 2008 at 7:07 am
@Seb: I don’t have anything that will do that. However, if it is one or two websites in particular that you’d like to change and you happen to be using Firefox, you can use the Stylish extension to make your own adjustments. Good luck!
July 30th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
[...] 1, 2007 — I got fed up with fully-justified text on the web and wrote Unjustify, a bookmarklet to zap it to oblivion. And, I still use it all the [...]
July 20th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
[...] Okay, so going on from what we were talking about yesterday (and what Jem is talking about today) I present to you all: the Unjustify Bookmarklet. [...]
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