Is there still something wrong with justified text in online media (compared to print media) nowadays?
Wikipedia says at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment, that:
A common type of text alignment in print media is "justification", where the spaces between words, and, to a lesser extent, between glyphs or letters, are stretched or compressed to align both the left and right ends of each line of text.
Here is an example, from a long post with several answers (the topic being absolutely irrelevant), how unjustified text looks like: I am a serial upvoter.
This is a link to a seven year old discussion from the sister site SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/315845/should-i-avoid-using-text-align-justify with a lot of good points about this issue, but some of the more recent comments indicate that "thigs are slowly changing".
And here is a more recent post (actually, the only post here at M.TEX.SE containing both the words "justified" and "text"): Why doesn't TeX.sx use TeX fonts? showing an awesome rendering of justified text.
Yet, online media, such as http://time.com/ or www.wsj.com/europe or http://edition.cnn.com/ does not seem to use justified text, so this seems to be the "industry standard", as of today.
I understand that justified text in certain environments could look strange, e.g. when the text width got resized together with the window size. However, this does not seem to be the case here, at TEX.SE.
Are there any, (if so, then what?) technical obstacles in implementing a justified text to a website? One possibility I could think of is that justification might require extra resources (i.e. slows things down).
Are there any typographical reasons against using justified text in online media?
Is left-aligned text the best choice for an online typographical site, and is this the state-of-the art? There is really nothing better to do? Is the site TEX.SE an exemplary online media site, based on its typographical outlook? If the consensus is, that automatic/mandatory justification cannot work, would it be possible to format existing/new posts, where appropriate, to justified text? Would such a feature-request would make any sense, and would anyone actually support such a feature request? Again, it seems to me that the width of the posts and comments are fixed, so window-resizing wouldn't cause things to go crazy. So, to summarize:
why the text at TEX.SE is not justified?
:)
:)