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HTMLHelp Forums _ Cascading Style Sheets _ Text-Align CSS Question

Posted by: Newbie With No Skills Sep 10 2011, 07:56 PM

I am new to the study of CSS, and have not much experience. I am wanting to know if there is a general rule when it comes to Text-Alignment. We have many options, left, right, and center. But in respect to the body tag, what options do most opt to choose? I notice many choose text-align: left; . But is there a general practice among the pros?

Thank you

Posted by: pandy Sep 10 2011, 09:06 PM

Don't use text-align at all for the bulk of the text. Which means the text will be left aligned for western languages. Right aligned text is very odd to read (if the language is read from left to right, that is) and centered text is also considered hard do read.

My personal opinion is that centered text is a newbie thing. You do it just because you can and think it looks cool at first. But in the long run it doesn't look good and, as said, it's hard to read.

Justified text looks good in a book or a newspaper, but it doesn't work so well on the web. The gaps between words aren't distributed as evenly as on a professionally done printed page and you tend to get streaks of whitespace from top to bottom which doesn't look nice.

Not saying a few short lines here and there can't be centered or right aligned, but for large chunks of text, just let it be.

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