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Widows and orphans #11
Description
This GitHub issue is for collecting web developer signals for Widows and orphans.
The widows and orphans CSS properties set the minimum lines included in a text fragment created by page, column, or region breaks.
Browser support
- Chrome 25 (Feb 21, 2013)
- Chrome Android 25 (Feb 27, 2013)
- Edge 12 (Jul 29, 2015)
- Firefox: not supported
- Firefox for Android: not supported
- Safari 1.3 (Apr 15, 2005)
- Safari on iOS 1 (Jun 29, 2007)
Give us feedback
If you're pressed for time, but you want this feature to be available in all browsers, please give this issue a thumbs up 👍 reaction.
However, a much better guide for us is to know how you'd use this feature, and what you're having to do in the meantime. This helps us judge the priority versus other features.
Copy the template below in a comment, and add the details that matter to you.
## What I want to do with this feature
<!-- Add your specific use-cases, even if they seem obvious to you. -->
## What I'm having to do in the meantime
<!--
Are you having to use another feature instead, a polyfill, or is it blocking you completely?
Why are the alternatives worse than using this feature?
-->All comments are expected to adhere to the Code of Conduct.
Learn more
You can learn more about this feature here:
Reacted by Vincent Bernat, Mo, Sebastian Zartner, Jayden Pearse, Psychpsyo (Cameron), larsilikum, Gitoffthelawn, phantomxx29474, Timmy, Sascha Leib and 6 more
Activity
saschaleib commentedon Sep 20, 2026
What I want to do with this feature
Let me first point out that typesetters and scribes have gathered many centuries – indeed even millenia – of experience how to keep legibility of a text at a high level. One of the aspects that they found is that having too little text of a paragraph on the end of a page – or at the beginning of a new page – makes the reader stumble over it, thus interrupting the flow of reading. In other words: these are established best practices.
While more and more reading indeed happens on-screen (where there are no pages in the traditional sense), there are also a lot of readers who prefer to print out longer and more complex texts for "offline" reading. Not only to be independent of the network, but also because it is easier to read from paper, and also easier to actually remember later what has been read.
What I'm having to do in the meantime
As someone who is aware of, and likes to cater to this audience, I currently have to use some rather clumsy workarounds (using invisible
::beforeand::afterblocks) to enforce this "best practice" on all common browsers. It would certainly make my life (and that of many fellow web designers) easier, iforphansandwidowswould become "baseline supported". And I'm sure a lot of "offline readers" would appreciate it, too.