I often notice myself mentally reconstructing hyphenated words to understand them. I don’t think I’d consciously be aware of that if hyphenation was truly more readable.

In handwriting, hyphenation is rare. In young children’s books, hyphenation is not used. Hyphenation only exists to cut costs.

So save it for media=”print” CSS.

I don’t know that you can easily fix this, because an <a> tag may contain a URL which you may not want to be hyphenated, or may contain text which you would want to be hyphenated.

Is it re-peating-linear-gradient? Or perhaps repeating-lin-ear-gradient?

I also noticed the instructions for commenting offered me a <del date-time=”">, where that attribute should simply be “datetime” (no hyphen).

Reading your article on desktop felt awkward to me. I am out of practice with tracking from a hyphenated line end to a mid-word line start.

Seeing “exam-ple” wrapped so that “ple” is the only bold part of the text just below the “Your Comment” box looks especially weird.

Following along that line I see “comment—espe-cially” which also looks pretty odd.

The print designers I work with would want to typeset those area manually to avoid the hyphen.

Tested with Firefox 17.0.0.1 in Windows 7.

This is most probably due to my lack of reading english books, I learnt mostly english on the web where hyphenation didn’t exist until recently ;)

Just my 2 cents..

As for the question of better, fine-grained control raised by J. Hogue above, CSS4 text will have additional properties: hyphenate-limit-zone, hyphenate-limit-chars, hyphenate-limit-lines and hyphenate-limit-last.

@page media types have orphans and widow declarations, but those reference the first and last lines of paragraphs, not hyphenation preferences. How long before we get more control over hyphenation, I wonder?

Prince XML has hyphenate-patterns (to specific the breaking algorithm), hyphenate-after (how many characters minimum after the break), hyphenate-before (min characters before the break), and hyphenate-lines (max hyphenations in a row). In general, Prince has some of the best CSS typographical support in the business.

I’m talking about minimum letters before a hyphen, minimum letters after a hyphen, max number of hyphens in a row, whether or not to break capitalized words, and avoiding breaking the last word in a paragraph to create a nasty orphan. Users of software like InDesign would be familiar with these common “H&Js”.

@page media types have orphans and widow declarations, but those reference the first and last lines of paragraphs, not hyphenation preferences. How long before we get more control over hyphenation, I wonder?