Hyphenation
I do wish Wikipedia would make use of hyphenations. And I wish hyphenations would just be a Html standard. I mean really, how hard is it? We have an open source hyphenation algorithm since 30 years or whatever.
Please compare yourself in the gallery below.
There are some efforts to bring hyphenations to the Web, like the phpHyphenator. Please compare also the showdown LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer. The Web would have zero points.
Talking about ugliness. The whole Web is ugly. No hyphenations, no real small caps, no ligatures. From typographic perspective the Web took a huge step back since Gutenberg first invented the printing press.
As I think more about it, the hyphenations, real small caps, ligatures and other typographic niceness needs to be integrated in the web browser. For example, it is very difficult to add hyphenations on the server or with JavaScript. On the server it should only be possible if the site have a static layout, i.e. a static width. If the site have a dynamic width (i.e. use 50% of the window size), there is no way for the server to calculate the hyphenations and it needs to be done on the client.
Since the browser is responsible to how to render the web site, the browser can easily add typographic. It can also be implemented in a way so the user is not affected by the typographic. When the user selects a text and copy it, the user will expect to copy the original text without any hyphenations or ligatures.
