Safari Technology Preview Supports a More Comprehensive Interpretation of ‘Pretty’ Text-Wrap ⇥ webkit.org

I needed cheering up after the last post. Sorry about that.

Jen Simmons, of Apple’s WebKit team:

While support for pretty shipped in Chrome 117, Edge 177, and Opera 103 in Fall 2023, and Samsung Internet 24 in 2024, the Chromium version is more limited in what it accomplishes. According to an article by the Chrome team, Chromium only makes adjustments to the last four lines of a paragraph. It’s focused on preventing short last lines. It also adjusts hyphenation if consecutive hyphenated lines appear at the end of a paragraph.

The purpose of pretty, as designed by the CSS Working Group, is for each browser to do what it can to improve how text wraps.

Where many in my profession get excited for new APIs to make web apps more capable, this is what brings me similar joy. Maybe more. I love to see any typography improvements on the web which I, in my finest fuddy-duddy fashion, still regard as a primarily document-based environment.