Re: A proposed standard for CSS-controlled sentence spacing

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Thomas A. Fine
<fine@head.cfa.harvard.edu>wrote:

> On 1/11/13 11:49 AM, Jens O. Meiert wrote:
>
>> The javascript relies on finding two spaces between sentences for
>>> sentence detection.
>>>
>>
>> I can’t help it: “[T]ypographically speaking, typing two spaces before
>> the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong.”
>>
>> * http://web.archive.org/web/**20110728124818/http://www.**
>> slate.com/id/2281146/pagenum/**all/<http://web.archive.org/web/20110728124818/http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/pagenum/all/>
>> * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Sentence_spacing#Typography<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing#Typography>
>> * http://designaday.tumblr.com/**post/129167950/an-appeal-to-**
>> english-teachers<http://designaday.tumblr.com/post/129167950/an-appeal-to-english-teachers>
>>
>
> Before I answer let me say this.  HTML should not take sides in any debate
> like this.  It should provide the necessary tools for either "side" of the
> argument.  Unfortunately the current situation is that HTML has the
> appearance of having already taken sides.  In most discussions of "one or
> two spaces", HTML's space-collapsing behavior is held up as an endorsement
> from the web standards people (us) that "one space" is the only correct
> option.
>

Would introducing one or both of the following help allow authors to mark
"sentence separator spaces" as having the desired semantics?

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xsl11-20061205/#white-space-treatment
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xsl11-20061205/#suppress-at-line-break