My vague feeling is that consensus has steadily been creeping up that hyphenation is just a bad idea in general, along with justifying prose on any but very narrow columns like newsprint.

Hyphenation is necessary for full justification, and full justification is indispensable for any long-form body text. It’s actually hardest to do well in narrow columns. If it has fallen out of favor worth web designers, it’s more probably a matter of form following function – designers first abandoning it because web browsers never implemented it well, then deciding they must not have wanted it all along.

score 1 · canonical