Opened 23 months ago
Closed 11 months ago
#6954 closed defect (bug) (fixed)
Remove excessive automatic hyphenation
| Reported by: |
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Owned by: | |
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| Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
| Component: | Plugin Directory | Keywords: | |
| Cc: |
Description
The WordPress.org site makes heavy use of automatic word hyphenation via hyphens: auto; word-wrap: break-word; in CSS. On the Plugin Directory this is noticeable for being overly prominent, causing many short words within paragraphs to be hyphenated when there's no need for it (I'm using latest Chrome on macOS).
Examples
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/public-post-preview/ - short words such as "other" and "preview" are hyphenated even when they're used within short paragraphs.
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/ - an entire paragraph spanning four lines has every word at the end of the line hyphenated:
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/ - another paragraph almost entirely hyphenated:
Impact
Personally I find this makes paragraphs of text much more difficult to read, but I'm not overly familiar with the accessibility implications. I know that uneven edges are also a problem for some people.
As far as I can tell this was implemented in r6194 to alleviate unwanted overflow, but there's no discussion about hyphens specifically on #2861. This was five years ago so browser behaviour may have been different at the time.
Proposal
I think we should consider removing this automatic hyphenation from the plugin directory styles. It would be good to investigate if there are published guidelines from any of the major publishes around use of hyphens and automatic hyphenation of narrow columns of text. The accessibility team should be consulted and it'll need to be tested in the most popular browsers.
This was worked on with the new theme for the plugin directory.
https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2024/04/30/the-plugin-directory-gets-a-refresh/
I believe this was fixed.