add(foundations): balanced text wrapping page#56
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New spec page documenting text-wrap: balance / pretty (CSS Text Module Level 4) for intelligent line breaking on headings and body copy, plus a worked-example implementation in the site's own stylesheet. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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pretty runs a slower wrapping algorithm with no line cap, so its cost scales with how much text it touches — MDN cautions to reserve it for body copy where layout matters more than speed. The page previously called the whole feature "free and safe", which is true for balance (line-capped, cheap) but misleading for pretty. Qualify the claim, add the trade-off to "How to implement", and add a Common mistakes bullet against blanket-applying it via a universal selector. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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What
New spec page: Balanced text wrapping under
foundations.Documents
text-wrap: balance(even out short heading wraps) andtext-wrap: pretty(avoid orphans in body copy) from thetext-wrapshorthand — the modern, declarative replacement for<br>/ line-break hacks. Degrades to normal wrapping where unsupported, so it needs no feature query.Why now
text-wrapis the natural companion to our other "modern CSS platform feature" foundations pages (popover-api, color-scheme, the pending anchor-positioning). The shorthand reached Baseline 2024 andtext-wrap: balanceis now supported across Chromium, Firefox, and Safari;prettytrails (no Firefox yet) and is documented as a progressive enhancement. It's a genuine readability win that we had no page for.Ship-it-before-you-spec-it
Same PR ships the worked example:
text-wrap: balanceon.prose-specheadings andtext-wrap: prettyon body paragraphs insrc/styles/global.css, commented with a back-reference to the page (matching the file's existing convention for scrollbar-gutter / view-transitions / dvh).Primary source
text-wrapshorthand — W3C CSS Working Group (leads the citation). MDN (canonical/Reference/Properties/text-wrap), Chrome for Developers, and WebKit for context.Status
recommended— a progressive enhancement a modern site should adopt; it is never a platform requirement (unsupported browsers simply wrap normally), so notrequiredper the status bar.Changes
src/content/spec/foundations/text-wrap.md(new, canonical sections, British English, ~470 words)src/styles/global.cssrelatedSlugswired reciprocally intofont-loadingandcolor-schemeaddedentry (2026-06-25-text-wrap.md)og-default/checklist/spec/foundationscategory)SKILL.md untouched — its page count reads "140+", still accurate at 149, so no digest recompute needed.
Verification
npm run buildpasses (149 pages indexed).npm run format:checkclean.npm run lint0 errors (1 pre-existing warning in an unrelated.astrofile).Opened as a draft for maintainer review — not for auto-merge.
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