Thank you for taking the time to respond, though. I had not heard the columns-as-line-separators argument before, but I'm not sure I buy it as most books are justified but do not use multiple columns.

> with tons of displays we can't be sure how the text will look fully justified.

This argument could be applied to ragged text, too. Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it? The answer then seems to simply be "compute the layout on the client", as is done anyway.

> Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it?

No, I'm saying it's unpredictable so we should avoid using it, while left aligned text is the default that works best in any circumstance.

Huh? I would think that, for every fully justified line there’s a left-justified one with the same content that is, at worst, equally wide, but typically less wide.

I think full justification traditionally is done for aesthetics, possibly with a bit of “look what we can do” added (it takes a better typesetter to set a line fully justified than it does to set a left-justified one with equal-sized spacing, even when both cases use kerning)

Justification makes sense when you can hyphenate words, that way you can pack more letters, otherwise the whole word would break into the next line.

”In left-aligned text, hyphenation evens the irregular right edge of the text, called the rag.”