CSS letter spacing oddities

Published on 12 Nov 2007 at 8:43 pm.
Filed under Web stuff.

While trying to help my friend Jeff help work on his sister’s web site I explained to him that he had a text-align justify rule. For a lark I suggested if he wanted to keep that going he could always use letter-spacing/word-spacing. While looking for a URL to send to him I discovered that word/letter-spacing may take negative values.

For the life of me I could not think of a real-world use case for allowing negative values. The best I could think of was to reverse the display of characters, so I tried giving letter-spacing a negative 1em value. Holy macaroni! Talk about inconsistent! Safari 3 on Windows does show the content inverted like I expected. The content is entirely hidden in Firefox. The last ‘e’ in ‘Content Here’ is the only character to display in Internet Explorer 6. It appears that Opera 9.5 ignores the rule entirely!!!