He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong.
Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.
The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.
As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.
For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.
The view at CMOS is that there is no reason for two spaces after a period in published work. [...] So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period.
The CMoS is hardly a final authority on the matter. It is just one common style, and is optimized for a particular presentation and publication style. It is also used by teachers to get students to write more words when their requirement is a page count.
He's the least technical "technology columnist" I've ever read.
Being a supposed technology columnist, he should have been aware that yes, text is still often rendered in monospace fonts. His grasp of history is just horribly wrong: "Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts." He's talking about exotic hardware that was used by approximately no one.
Being a supposed technology columnist, he should also have done some research to find out how single and double spaces are rendered by word processors and email clients. Double-spacing is perfectly fine if word processors know what two spaces after a period mean and render it appropriately. I was taught that they do, so for me, double-spacing after a period seems like the perfect solution: double-spacing is the least bad solution for monospace fonts, and for proportional fonts, a double-space after a period will automatically be rendered correctly. If he wanted to do an actual service for his readers, he could have told us whether that is true or not. Since he is, you know, a technology columnist. Doesn't that title imply something beyond the ability to review smart phones?
Well put. I learned to type on an old fashioned IBM typewriter when I was in middle school. We were taught the two spaces after a period rule and that's so burned into my mind that it takes effort to use a single space after a period.
This really felt like a two page rant over something that very few people in the world even notice when reading, and even fewer would care. On the other-hand, unlearning the two-space rule for someone who touch types fast enough to transcribe most people's speaking speed in real-time is going to take an enormous amount of effort.
Even if I agreed with the statements presented in the article I didn't find anything compelling enough to justify the effort of retraining my fingers.
Another writing convention I read long ago which grew out of typewriter limitation is placing a comma or period within quotation marks when not part of the quotation as in:
I'm a fully qualified "hacker."
The period is not part of the quotation, but American writing style suggests it should still go within the quotation marks. America appears to be the only English speaking country to have this writing style; it's not that way in Britain, for example. I read this was due to something like ink splotching (or possibly it was jamming up of keys, which apparently gave us the non-optimum QWERTY layout) from where the typewriter would strike the page on mechanical typewriters when typing quickly if leaving the punctuation outside of the quotation marks as logic would dictate. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but I generally rebel and use the British style when writing, especially in informal situations like posting online comments.
Even in America, MLA says you should place commas and periods outside quotation marks (unless they're part of the quote), whereas Chicago says you should place them outside. I prefer to put them outside quotation marks; there's a reason why this style is called "logical punctuation". MLA usually gets ignored in America, though.
I'm wondering if the reason MLA is usually ignored in America is that there is some truth to what I read about typewriters influencing the illogical style, which modern day editors seem to insist upon.
Actually, the modern convention of a single space is not due to saving space.† A proportional computer font is kerned in such a way that the space after a period is wider then between words. For example, a standard space is 1em‡, but the space after the period is kerned to give a width of 1.5em‡‡. A typewriter on the other hand only has a single 1em space, so either use 1 space or 2. Also, I read once that they used 2 spaces on a typewriter to reinforce the ending of the sentence in case the period did not strike properly.
† Though newspapers are famous for tricks like this such as the missing oxford comma according the AP Stylebook, and I wouldn't put it past the newspapers to have done single spaces years ago for this reason. There are several differences between AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style to account for saving space.
‡ An em is the width of the lowercase m in the font.
‡‡ 1.5em isn't a hard and fast rule. The rule is wider than an em and less than 2 em's. It could be 1 1/3 is common as well. In reality, a designer spends agonizing amounts of adjusting the kerning on a font til it looks how they want.
> Actually, the modern convention of a single space is not due to saving space.† A proportional computer font is kerned in such a way that the space after a period is wider then between words.
That's not "the modern convention of a single space"; that's "a return to the original convention of wider than a normal character width spacing". Note your reference to the width of the space being 1.5em, for instance.
An em is the width of an upper-case M. If you look at printed text you'll see that spaces are much narrower, in fact narrower than ens - compare a space with an en dash.
Interesting data point when a comment on a forum so clearly surpasses an article written by a professional writer for an online publication.
This, ultimately, is why journalism is losing. The stuff the pros write is no better than the stuff other people write for free in blog posts and comments on forums.
Which is why paywalls don't work. The stuff behind them isn't better enough that readers will pay to get at it.
I have bad news for you: I'm a professional writer.
I just happen to be much better at it than that hack, even though he probably gets paid more. Of course, the reason he (probably) gets paid more is that he writes for Slate, while I write for TechRepublic. Since he's supposed to be a technology writer for Slate, and I'm basically any kind of writer for TR (specifically security, open source issues, and programming, but that's not relevant in this case), you can pretty much bet money that I know more about the subjects our writings have in common than him, despite the fact he probably gets paid more for his ignorance than I do for my knowledge.
So it goes.
In any case, I really appreciate the implicit compliment, despite the fact this comment at HN was very much off the cuff and not among my best recent writings. I agree it's better than the Slate piece, though perhaps primarily because the Slate writer didn't set the bar very high.
By the way, I scraped together a longer, more in-depth version of my HN comment that you liked for my personal devlog:
I think it's better written than my HN comment, too.
edit: Of course, I became a professional writer by making comments in discussions at TechRepublic that people liked, so maybe I don't qualify as the type of "professional writer" you meant to address.
You must be careful when comparing the worst to the best. Farhad has been a crummy technology writer since he was at Salon, and this is basically the only site on which I read comments. I would much rather read a great story by a great journalist than any comment by the average Youtube commenter.
It seems that the reason it's wrong is that typographers say it is.[single space]The author has not given an actual reason, other than appeal to authority.
My muscle memory (using 2 spaces) after ~6 months of typing class was so conditioned it made it impossible to help my teacher evaluation some new software that used 1 space.
Double spacing helps to set sentences off from each other visually. I prefer reading material that's double-spaced, so that's the way I prefer to write.
It's also to some extent simply out of habit. But even if my only reason was because Miss Millie in the 3rd grade told me to( another appeal to authority ), I'm not writing desperate screeds admonishing everyone about being bad people because they aren't listening to Miss Millie.
Actually, its your browser that renders multiple spaces as a single space. If you want multiple spaces in your HTML you have to use the non-breakable space tag " ".
The HTML rendering engine in your browser actually consolidates each block of white space into a single visible space character. If you view source, there are two spaces there. So, there's a good reason not to use two spaces, as the web will only show the one.
It's because spacing is used for both structure and presentation in HTML, so something like:
<span>This is some text</span>
<span>while this is some more text.</span>
shouldn't render the 4 indentation spaces that I used.. If it did we'd have to pack it all into one line. Can be adjusted appropriately with CSS though, if people here were obsessive about the presentation of their spacing.
So I guess you could argue that putting two spaces in HTML is strictly a negative: it does nothing, except when it makes things look worse. Even that being as it is, I'll never stop putting two spaces between sentences.
There's something kooky going on with that page. I think the CMS used for that site must be substituting one type of space character with another in Unicode, or something like that, so that the browser does not "know" how to collapse the two whitespace characters into a single whitespace character.
When I copy the two whitespace characters between sentences there into separate text files that contain nothing but those whitespace characters, then `diff a.txt b.txt`, the result is that they differ, so there is definitely some difference between the two types of whitespace characters used between sentences.
I've written a text formatting tool designed to preserve multiple whitespace instances on the Web. It used ` ` for the first of every pair of standard single space characters. Apparently, this CMS is doing something similar, but even tricker because it doesn't show up in the source as an HTML entity, and perhaps less well thought-out because for some reason the nonbreaking version space character used is the second of the two (which results in weird ghost-spaces at the beginnings of lines sometimes, as you discovered).
That's not a good reason to use two spaces -- that's a good reason for people who think one space is "the standard" to stop haranguing people who use more than one character width to separate sentences when typing.
Among other things, it makes it easier to jump around by sentence in a text editor. I think the late Erik Naggum of comp.lang.lisp fame was always a two-spacer for this reason or some related one.
If you want to write a parsing program that can delineate sentences, doing so in the face of abbreviations can be difficult. If, for instance, a sentence ends with an abbreviation, and the next sentence starts with a proper noun, an algorithm would detect a run-on sentence and would have to resort to tearing the grammar in the two adjoining sentences apart to figure out where to split them.
If there is a double space between sentences, the problem is reduced to a trivial string splitting operation.
Furthermore, any app that visually displays the text should know that some people use two spaces between sentences, and can trivially correct for this if it's implementing its own fancy typography. HTML already ignores multiple contiguous 0x20 spaces. Any text rendering algorithm fancy enough to implement good typography can likewise simply ignore the double space.
Double spaces between sentences have no mandatory effect on visual layout since layout algorithms can ignore the extra space, However, it can have a significant effect on the speed, if not accuracy, of text parsing algorithms.
Double space sentence delimiters simplify sentence tokenization into an almost trivial exercise in most cases. Single space delimiters make sentence tokenization actually quite hard.
I'm a couple of years younger than Julian Assange and commonly use two spaces after each sentence, purely out of muscle memory. (I took a "keyboarding" class in 1987 or so using an IBM Selectric typewriter and that's the way I was taught to do it.)
I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough about it to write that you should "never, ever" do it. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I was expecting an actual negative consequence of using two spaces. Typography is important, but I'd guess that with modern kerning techniques the difference between two spaces and one is slight. (In fact, if I were designing a word processing app, I'd think this is is a case I'd account for: If there is a "proper" distance between the period at the end of one sentence and the start of the next letter, wouldn't you ensure that's the distance that is used whether the user typed one space or two?)
Yes, LaTeX ignores anything more than one whitespace in the source. It does, however, automatically insert extra space after a period. (Unless you disable it with the ~ symbol, e.g. after the word Mr. or e.g.)
It seems to me, and Wikipedia seems to confirm, that single spaces after a period used to be called "French spacing" or "French bands". It was not standard US practice in the days of hot type or even photo type.
One of the first things I do when laying out a publication is to find/replace "__" with "_". It's mainly for the sake of consistency; I always receive documents that have a mix of both.
HTML removes extra spaces. I used a double space there, but you only see a single space. Since much of what people read these days is HTML, that's going to become what people expect to see, so I expect single spacing to become the standard. I bet that will have more of an effect on changing people's minds than "expert" opinions.
How so when no published material uses a double space? Did anyone notice and change their approach because of it? Why should HTML rendering change that?
People double space because that is what they were taught. People single space because that is what they were taught. Few people make the effort to change their ways for something they perceive as trivial and which they don't even notice while reading every single day anyway.
I think that, outside of journalism, very few people were "taught" single spacing. I suspect that mostly, non-journalists who use single spacing between sentences are people who learned by reading tweets, SMS messages, and Facebook pages.
Years ago, working on GNU documentation, RMS instructed me to use two spaces. The documents were processed into HTML, TeX, Texinfo, and plain text, the former two of which auto-collapsed two spaces into one, and the latter two of which were often viewed with a monospace font, thus benefiting from the extra space.
I carried this practice over into the rest of my writing, although recently I have noticed that some web systems do not auto-collapse two spaces, and when filling out forms online I've generally reverted back to using single spaces to ensure proper spacing.
Talk about getting worked up over nothing. Must have had a deadline for a column and nothing better to write about.
I use a double space after a period. Always have. I also still use monospaced fonts for almost any composing I do, because I use Emacs whenever possible for that kind of thing.
Any normal text layout software (a browser rendering HTML, TeX) is going to ignore whitespace in the source anyway.
In Emacs you also benefit from sentence-level commands that let you move forward or backward by sentence, kill the current sentence etc. Very helpful. These commands recognize sentences by the double space so they don't confuse abbreviations with sentences. See the Emacs manual, chapter Text > Sentences.
He just taught me that I'm supposed to uses two spaces after a period when doing most of my writing.. in programs.. which are still usually viewed with fixed width fonts.
Amusing: his argument is that authorities say to use one, so use one. He then refutes arguments by others that they learned to use two spaces from their authorities, so they do. "That's wrong!" he says.
But he also gives the reasons why current authorities say one, and previous authorities say two - all due to the aesthetics and readability of spaces with proportional typesetting versus monospaced type.
The reasons are fairly subjective, but I don't see why so many here are dismissing them simply as pure arguments from authority.
I pretty much decided from the title alone that I will begin to use double space just to piss the author off. After reading the article I'm sure that I made the right decision.
This is a software problem. Programs that display proportional text should recognize one or more spaces after a period as a sentence break and should render appropriately.
. . . unless it's not a sentence break, as in the case of "Mrs. Rigsby" or "etc. etc. etc.", or any of dozens of other options.
On the other hand, software configured to recognize two spaces after a period is far more likely to work properly for identifying sentence endings, as long as you type two spaces between sentences.
Using two spaces after the end of a sentence allows software to recognize sentences without doubt. There are no heuristics involved which would always be on the verge of failing. That allows me to issue commands which works on sentences mindlessly, and to enable auto-capitalization. The former is the killer feature.
In general, modern typesetting software (and/or fonts) should be able to properly set the width of spaces between sentences to be slightly wider than than those between words. Unfortunately, TeX is the only common typesetter I know that does this.
What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone-everyone!-said it was proper to use two spaces.
What the articles fails to clearly mention, is that many style manuals used in high schools in the 80's were steeped in the monospaced technology of the time and taught two spaces as correct.
Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach.
This is one of the few mentions in this article of this fact -- that two-spacing was once dogma. This makes me seriously doubt the objectivity of this article. (Actually, I don't think this article is attempting any degree of objectivity at all.)
HN confuses this issue, since we type our comments monospaced, but they are displayed proportional. (Which is why I also double-dash!)
Actually, you should use a period inside parentheses if the enclosed material is meant to stand alone as a sentence.
By the way, there is no space before the exclaimation mark in American English.
As for double spacing after a sentence, I had broken myself of the habit once I learned all publications use single spaces, but the iPhone has conditioned me to use double spaces again since that's the shortcut to drop a period at the end of a sentence.
Exactly, when I'm at a computer I sometimes find myself back in my old habit of double spacing, and that's because of the double space tap on the iPhone. Perhaps I should disable the double tap space and get back in the habit of sliding my finger from [123] to the period key to end sentences (which automatically returns to the alphabet keyboard). Certainly it would save me from having to press delete after the double space to end a paragraph.
In the case of the computer programmers, they were most certainly correct. Is the author really so quick to condemn while not realizing that programming is almost always done with monospaced fonts?
Anyway, I never have to worry about this these days anyway. Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)
Indeed, this really only seems to be an issue for the (admittedly large majority) of computer users who:
- write documents in a WYSIWYG editor
- don't publish those documents on the Web, or another setting where the reader's software (as opposed to the editor) makes decisions about how to display the text
Basically, this sounds like one more reason not to use Word (and similar), or share documents in .doc/.odt/etc. format [1]. It shouldn't even affect HTML email.
Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)
You still need to pay attention to this using LaTeX -- LaTeX will (usually) insert a wider-than-normal space after a period, which isn't always correct (e.g., "Mrs.", "etc.", and so forth). You can avoid this using "~".
The author also fails to grasp the fact that if "Everyone-everyone!" (including "accomplished professionals") follows a given convention, then that convention must be correct, because that is what convention is.
Prescriptivists are universally incorrect, when they criticise universally practised convention.
It's not tough to write 2000 words or so on the subject. It's just difficult to write 2000 words or so on the subject and still end up with so little substance.
> I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces.
>Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
Seriously? That article felt like it was written by someone at 4chan. Why did this get so many upvotes?
If the MLA says one space then it has changed since I was in school (~10 years ago). We were always told to use a double space at the end of a sentence and while he links to the Chicago MLA, the actual MLA website also eludes to the fact that it used to be two spaces: http://www.mla.org/style_faq3.
Yes it has changed. Note: it's changed. It's no longer correct to call Pluto a planet, and it's no longer correct to double space after a sentence. And the MLA style guide is not Solid Snake so it probably doesn't elude anything, though it might allude to some things (as long as we're being pedantic).
Hi Everyone, I am a two spacer between sentences, and a triple spacer for paragraph starters, and a newline between paragraphs. No wonder nobody reads my emails. :-)
173 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadTwo spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.
The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.
As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.
For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.
Being a supposed technology columnist, he should have been aware that yes, text is still often rendered in monospace fonts. His grasp of history is just horribly wrong: "Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts." He's talking about exotic hardware that was used by approximately no one.
Being a supposed technology columnist, he should also have done some research to find out how single and double spaces are rendered by word processors and email clients. Double-spacing is perfectly fine if word processors know what two spaces after a period mean and render it appropriately. I was taught that they do, so for me, double-spacing after a period seems like the perfect solution: double-spacing is the least bad solution for monospace fonts, and for proportional fonts, a double-space after a period will automatically be rendered correctly. If he wanted to do an actual service for his readers, he could have told us whether that is true or not. Since he is, you know, a technology columnist. Doesn't that title imply something beyond the ability to review smart phones?
This really felt like a two page rant over something that very few people in the world even notice when reading, and even fewer would care. On the other-hand, unlearning the two-space rule for someone who touch types fast enough to transcribe most people's speaking speed in real-time is going to take an enormous amount of effort.
Even if I agreed with the statements presented in the article I didn't find anything compelling enough to justify the effort of retraining my fingers.
http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57
I'm a fully qualified "hacker."
The period is not part of the quotation, but American writing style suggests it should still go within the quotation marks. America appears to be the only English speaking country to have this writing style; it's not that way in Britain, for example. I read this was due to something like ink splotching (or possibly it was jamming up of keys, which apparently gave us the non-optimum QWERTY layout) from where the typewriter would strike the page on mechanical typewriters when typing quickly if leaving the punctuation outside of the quotation marks as logic would dictate. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but I generally rebel and use the British style when writing, especially in informal situations like posting online comments.
† Though newspapers are famous for tricks like this such as the missing oxford comma according the AP Stylebook, and I wouldn't put it past the newspapers to have done single spaces years ago for this reason. There are several differences between AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style to account for saving space.
‡ An em is the width of the lowercase m in the font.
‡‡ 1.5em isn't a hard and fast rule. The rule is wider than an em and less than 2 em's. It could be 1 1/3 is common as well. In reality, a designer spends agonizing amounts of adjusting the kerning on a font til it looks how they want.
That's not "the modern convention of a single space"; that's "a return to the original convention of wider than a normal character width spacing". Note your reference to the width of the space being 1.5em, for instance.
Otherwise, what you say is true.
This, ultimately, is why journalism is losing. The stuff the pros write is no better than the stuff other people write for free in blog posts and comments on forums.
Which is why paywalls don't work. The stuff behind them isn't better enough that readers will pay to get at it.
I just happen to be much better at it than that hack, even though he probably gets paid more. Of course, the reason he (probably) gets paid more is that he writes for Slate, while I write for TechRepublic. Since he's supposed to be a technology writer for Slate, and I'm basically any kind of writer for TR (specifically security, open source issues, and programming, but that's not relevant in this case), you can pretty much bet money that I know more about the subjects our writings have in common than him, despite the fact he probably gets paid more for his ignorance than I do for my knowledge.
So it goes.
In any case, I really appreciate the implicit compliment, despite the fact this comment at HN was very much off the cuff and not among my best recent writings. I agree it's better than the Slate piece, though perhaps primarily because the Slate writer didn't set the bar very high.
By the way, I scraped together a longer, more in-depth version of my HN comment that you liked for my personal devlog:
http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57
I think it's better written than my HN comment, too.
edit: Of course, I became a professional writer by making comments in discussions at TechRepublic that people liked, so maybe I don't qualify as the type of "professional writer" you meant to address.
I will continue to double-space until I'm dead.
(' ' one space vs. ' ' two spaces)
An effect of HTML, I'm sure. When I edit the post, the 2 spaces between the second set of quotes is indeed still there.
HTML ignores extra whitespace.
It's settled, then. :)
It's also to some extent simply out of habit. But even if my only reason was because Miss Millie in the 3rd grade told me to( another appeal to authority ), I'm not writing desperate screeds admonishing everyone about being bad people because they aren't listening to Miss Millie.
Edit: Looks like it does. Yay PG!
Edit2: Looks like I forgot some basics of HTML. My 14 year old self would be very disappointed.
Is there a good reason the browser messes up my spacing? Certainly not for readability!
I don't believe that's true when the browser decides to break the line between the two spaces -- see: http://i.imgur.com/MksV7.png (which I took from http://www.jeanhsu.com/?p=229)
So I guess you could argue that putting two spaces in HTML is strictly a negative: it does nothing, except when it makes things look worse. Even that being as it is, I'll never stop putting two spaces between sentences.
When I copy the two whitespace characters between sentences there into separate text files that contain nothing but those whitespace characters, then `diff a.txt b.txt`, the result is that they differ, so there is definitely some difference between the two types of whitespace characters used between sentences.
I've written a text formatting tool designed to preserve multiple whitespace instances on the Web. It used ` ` for the first of every pair of standard single space characters. Apparently, this CMS is doing something similar, but even tricker because it doesn't show up in the source as an HTML entity, and perhaps less well thought-out because for some reason the nonbreaking version space character used is the second of the two (which results in weird ghost-spaces at the beginnings of lines sometimes, as you discovered).
U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE character
Which is the same as HTML entity  
Well . . . several keystrokes, anyway, plus a Google lookup.
If you want to write a parsing program that can delineate sentences, doing so in the face of abbreviations can be difficult. If, for instance, a sentence ends with an abbreviation, and the next sentence starts with a proper noun, an algorithm would detect a run-on sentence and would have to resort to tearing the grammar in the two adjoining sentences apart to figure out where to split them.
If there is a double space between sentences, the problem is reduced to a trivial string splitting operation.
Furthermore, any app that visually displays the text should know that some people use two spaces between sentences, and can trivially correct for this if it's implementing its own fancy typography. HTML already ignores multiple contiguous 0x20 spaces. Any text rendering algorithm fancy enough to implement good typography can likewise simply ignore the double space.
Double spaces between sentences have no mandatory effect on visual layout since layout algorithms can ignore the extra space, However, it can have a significant effect on the speed, if not accuracy, of text parsing algorithms.
http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57
Double space sentence delimiters simplify sentence tokenization into an almost trivial exercise in most cases. Single space delimiters make sentence tokenization actually quite hard.
I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough about it to write that you should "never, ever" do it. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I was expecting an actual negative consequence of using two spaces. Typography is important, but I'd guess that with modern kerning techniques the difference between two spaces and one is slight. (In fact, if I were designing a word processing app, I'd think this is is a case I'd account for: If there is a "proper" distance between the period at the end of one sentence and the start of the next letter, wouldn't you ensure that's the distance that is used whether the user typed one space or two?)
People double space because that is what they were taught. People single space because that is what they were taught. Few people make the effort to change their ways for something they perceive as trivial and which they don't even notice while reading every single day anyway.
I carried this practice over into the rest of my writing, although recently I have noticed that some web systems do not auto-collapse two spaces, and when filling out forms online I've generally reverted back to using single spaces to ensure proper spacing.
I use a double space after a period. Always have. I also still use monospaced fonts for almost any composing I do, because I use Emacs whenever possible for that kind of thing.
Any normal text layout software (a browser rendering HTML, TeX) is going to ignore whitespace in the source anyway.
Thanks to him, we'll all have to write code in MS word.
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●------ http://u.ly/73I ------●
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There is no argument of value in this article.
The reasons are fairly subjective, but I don't see why so many here are dismissing them simply as pure arguments from authority.
"Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability."
...So, there's absolutely no evidence, yet everyone who doesn't agree is 'certainly' wrong...
On the other hand, software configured to recognize two spaces after a period is far more likely to work properly for identifying sentence endings, as long as you type two spaces between sentences.
In general, modern typesetting software (and/or fonts) should be able to properly set the width of spaces between sentences to be slightly wider than than those between words. Unfortunately, TeX is the only common typesetter I know that does this.
Articles with the word "ever" in the title: Beware their gross generalizations, lack of gray area, and hasty conclusions.
Articles with both the words "never" and "ever" in the title: Never, ever read them. (oops)
What the articles fails to clearly mention, is that many style manuals used in high schools in the 80's were steeped in the monospaced technology of the time and taught two spaces as correct.
Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach.
This is one of the few mentions in this article of this fact -- that two-spacing was once dogma. This makes me seriously doubt the objectivity of this article. (Actually, I don't think this article is attempting any degree of objectivity at all.)
HN confuses this issue, since we type our comments monospaced, but they are displayed proportional. (Which is why I also double-dash!)
By the way, there is no space before the exclaimation mark in American English.
As for double spacing after a sentence, I had broken myself of the habit once I learned all publications use single spaces, but the iPhone has conditioned me to use double spaces again since that's the shortcut to drop a period at the end of a sentence.
Anyway, I never have to worry about this these days anyway. Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)
- write documents in a WYSIWYG editor
- don't publish those documents on the Web, or another setting where the reader's software (as opposed to the editor) makes decisions about how to display the text
Basically, this sounds like one more reason not to use Word (and similar), or share documents in .doc/.odt/etc. format [1]. It shouldn't even affect HTML email.
[1] Cf. http://goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html
You still need to pay attention to this using LaTeX -- LaTeX will (usually) insert a wider-than-normal space after a period, which isn't always correct (e.g., "Mrs.", "etc.", and so forth). You can avoid this using "~".
Prescriptivists are universally incorrect, when they criticise universally practised convention.
. . . is a whole lot of stuff:
http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57
>Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
Seriously? That article felt like it was written by someone at 4chan. Why did this get so many upvotes?
signed,
-a die hard two spacer