CSS & vertical rhythm for text, images, and tables
5 points by vbernat
5 points by vbernat
On the web, vertical rhythm is highly overrated. It’s often presented as an inherent good (and is in this article), but in practice it’s almost never useful, and I’ve never heard a compelling argument for applying it beyond two general cases:
Aesthetics of ruled paper (but mostly I wish people wouldn’t with regular HTML text, because they never get the text baseline right, and you can’t without a known font or JavaScript, neither of which can be guaranteed, and even when you do, pixel snapping has a habit of making it look bad).
Heterogeneous content side-by-side: multiple columns (can be significant benefit), floats (generally little benefit, and requires flexible height rather than added spacing to really work), and paged media (especially if printed double-sided on thin paper—then it’s painful without rhythm).
All of these cases are rare for the web.
Yeah. I had a quick look at my copy of Bringhurst to see what he wrote about vertical rhythm. The reason he gives is so that lines are aligned across facing pages and on both sides of the paper, neither of which are relevant to the web. It isn’t about creating a predictable flow for the eye to follow. (In fact, irregular variations such as paragraphs and headings make a page easier for the eye to navigate.)
Even so, I think it’s nice to keep things to a simple multiple of the line spacing, such as headings and spacing around paragraphs and inset text (lists, quotes, etc.). But sometimes that gets overridden by other considerations: for instance, TeX is the most common typesetter I see that pretty much entirely gives up on a fixed vertical rhythm because it would cramp inline formulae too much.