Making HTML Headers Look Nice
Headings can show orphan issues that can cause readability issues.
In this context, an orphan is a single word (or syllable) that sits at the bottom of a paragraph of text.
As a developer, you don't know the final size, font size, or even the language of a headline or paragraph. All the variables needed for an effective and aesthetic treatment of text wrapping, are in the browser.
Using text-wrap: balance we can provide better control over these orphan headings.
Before we had text-wrap: balance
we had few tools to keep the heading lines balanced. The best (and probably only) options are to use the <wbr>
tag or the ­
entity to help browsers decide where to break lines and words.
:is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) {
max-width: 50ch;
max-inline-size: 50ch;
text-wrap: balance;
}
Use this as progressive enhancement. If this works, it's an improvement and, if it doesn't, then it'll look slightly worse but it will still display the content.