- From: Barney Wol <Barney.Wol@noctua.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 20:02:13 +0000
- To: html-tidy@w3.org
Personally I always use two spaces at the end of sentences. Yes, it does hark back to the days of manual, fixed-pitch typewriters, but it is the way I was taught and, more importantly, I believe it aids legibility. With no disrespect to Diane, compare her brief message below, to Charlie's. That the HTML specs require multiple white-space characters to be rendered as a single space certainly cleans up the resultant the layout, especially when there may be extra carriage-returns and/or line-feeds in the source, but it does make it more difficult for an author to achieve the desired result. Perhaps we need a more common double-width space character? Meantime, I am disappointed to hear that major publications are changing their style to be, IMHO, less legible. But this is getting a bit off-topic - sorry! As Tidy's whole purpose in life is to legalise documents, I think that it should replace the double spaces. If you disagree with the spec, then it is that which should be changed before Tidy. Just my two penn'th, Peter At 13:28 -0500 11/12/01, Reitzel, Charlie wrote: >That is good to know. Thanks. It makes a lot of sense in the modern, >kerned and variable pitch font world. The double space thing is really a >holdover from fixed-pitch fonts, going back, I'd wager, to the typewriter. > >-----Original Message----- >From: welch@units.ohio-state.edu [mailto:welch@units.ohio-state.edu] >Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 12:58 PM >To: Reitzel, Charlie >Subject: RE: don't collapse two spaces at the end of a sentence > >FWIW, I started out as a layout editor (Quark) for a journal that adhered >strictly to the Chicago Manual of Style. We used a single space after >periods. Journals like Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and more all now use >a single space after periods. I think that this is a standard that is in the >process of changing. I believe the MLA Handbook still requires two spaces >after periods, but it's been a while since I checked. > >Diane Welch >======================== > >The HTML specs all require that multiple, adjacent whitespace characters be >collapsed into a single space character. HTML developers everywhere quite >reasonably depend on this behavior. > >take it easy, >Charlie Barn Owls and more at http://www.owlsanctuary.co.uk/ See my web links page at: http://www.noctua.demon.co.uk/links/links.html PGP encryption software available free from <http://www.pgpi.org> My PGP id = 0x332B72C0 & PGP fp = 3535 9AD9 C0EA 3606 0DE4 3811 422E 10B4 332B 72C0
Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2001 15:37:43 UTC