Look Professor, No More Widow

If one thing I learned from my professor in my Advanced Typography class, it has to be widow. Every time he saw a widow in our paragraph, he would cross it out with his black pen. While widow is easier to control on a printed page, it is much harder to do on the web because you do not have control of how your texts would be filled into the visitor’s device. I have looked at many of my favorite sites and I see widows everywhere.

Out of curiosity, I tweeted my boy Tim Brown to see if he has any suggestion and he pointed me to the Widow Tamer. I actually heard of it in the past, but was not interested simply because it requires JavaScript. My practice has always been to avoid using JavaScript as much as possible unless I absolutely have to. I looked into CSS solution, but it is not being widely supported yet. So I had a bit of a dilemma. Should I have widows and no js or should a have a bit of js and no more widow. I went with the latter for now simply because I want to avoid widow. The js file is actually fairly tiny so it doesn’t do much harm to the overall performance. Maybe I can replace it with CSS in the future.