- From: Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@atlas.otago.ac.nz>
- Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 11:12:45 +1300 (NZDT)
- To: CReitzel@arrakisplanet.com, welch@units.ohio-state.edu
- Cc: html-tidy@w3.org
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.
It is important to remember that
(1) In the modern kerned and variable pitch font world,
there are actually two styles for sentence spacing:
"French spacing": a space is a space is a space.
"English spacing": inter-sentence spaces are a bit bigger than
inter-word spaces. When justifying, spacing after punctuation
(including inter-sentence spacing) has more "give" in it than
normal inter-word spacing.
(2) Fixed-pitch fonts arguably go back a lot further than the typewriter.
Look at Chinese, at Hangul, at "square" Hebrew letters, at cuneiform.
(3) Fixed-pitch fonts are still very widely used in computing,
especially in the programmers' editors that many of the HTML-hip
use to compose their HTML. Whatever spacing convention is used
by a Web browser to *present* the document (and surely that should
be controllable via CSS), that's irrelevant to the spacing convention
used for *composing* the document in a plain text editor.
In this mailing list, we're NOT talking about how the text ends up being
presented. We're talking about how the HTML source form is tidied, and
arguments from "modern" typography (really based on mediaeval scribes'
desire to cram as many words as they could onto their extremely expensive
writing medium) are entirely beside the point.
Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2001 17:13:26 UTC