An end to typographic widows on the web

Here’s a handy new thing coming to a CSS near you:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  text-wrap: balance;
}

Richard Rutter has the scoop and explains how this bit of CSS will help ensure that titles and large headings don’t break weirdly and leave a word on a line all by itself.

It doesn’t help in all cases though, as Richard notes:

Balancing left-aligned headings is not always preferable. I would love to have a value for text-wrap whose sole purpose is to prevent widows, without any other formatting involved.

Same! Although there’s a bunch of reasons why this doesn’t exist in CSS today, I’ll still take this one small improvement as a temporary stop gap before we can get to properly justified text on the web.