I don't plan to ever do something like this for any purpose, and I have never seen anybody do it either... But you can.
But shipping a whole dictionary wouldn't even be that unreasonable. A reasonable English dictionary is about 1.5MB compressed or 4MB uncompressed.
- layout and hyphenation algorithms on the web are worse (or often disabled!)
- the lines are often too long
- the site's margins aren't as strong as with print design
These factors combine to produce the mess you're describing.
I've spent so much time reading justified text in print that I do like it in general. But I think until places like NYT or Medium adopt it on their websites, it's probably not up to snuff on the web.
(edit: formatting)
In case you were complaining because you don't know why, rather than because you knew why but don't like it, it's LaTeX because it's Lamport + TeX; and it's actually not really TeX but TEΧ (that last letter is a chi), which, when typeset properly (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Te...), was meant specifically to show off TEΧ's layout abilities.
(In fact Lamport got into the spirit of it, and the real name is LATEΧ, again carefully typeset: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/La... . The common stylization LaTeX is just a convenient ASCII representation.)
I'm currently reading a book that has quite minimal indentation on the first line of a paragraph, no spacing between, small font, and justified text. Every page is just a wall of text. It makes it noticeably more tiring to read than others that I've read recently. It seems to be a trend in more serious historical tomes. The last one I read, the Beauty and the Terror, was similarly typeset.
It's one of the reasons I like reading on my kindle.
And lowercase letters are easier to read than ALL CAPITALIZED LETTERS IN A HORIZONTAL LINE OF TEXT.
Justified text is the same thing, but vertically. Your eye reaches the end of the line, and the next one is likely slightly longer or shorter, so it is easier for your eyes to find the next line instead of reading the same line over again, and also easier to see the whole shape of a particular paragraph you want to refer to later.
I do like well-hyphenated justified paragraphs in print, that also let you fit more words per page. But even there, I prefer the organic, non-uniform look of ragged text.
o_o
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[0] Like :-)
[0] and many many others: ;-) :-( :-| :-p 8-) …
[1] the graphical alternatives
[2] first commonly used in the early 80s, even before my time online, where emoji turned up right at the end of the 90s
> o_o
> “quasi” emojis
Welp, if you need me I'll be shuffling my weary bones into a casket.
So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...
I always thought that ~it's only called Champagne if it's from the Champagne region of France~ it's only called a smiley if it's smiling. But, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon (and as confirmed by http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm), their progenitor Scott Fahlman gave :-( as a prototypical example, so what do I know?
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Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt.
Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)