Re: double spaces

It was my own acknowledged print-oriented hypocrisy that made me bring up
spaces when I commented on your drop cap question!

I am debating the double-space after sentences with two other people off the
list (less we repeat the un-resolvable emoticon debate).  The problem is
that most word processors and browsers are NOT smart enough to lengthen the
gap between sentences (vice the gap between words) which IS commonly done in
type setting.

The jury is ambivalent on this issues.  Please reference URL:
http://www.mla.org/main_stl-nf.htm#spaces

I will offer this food for though up to the group:   If I expect a
significant number of my visitors to be using Lynx (without a screen reader)
and thus a mono spaced font, should I not defer to a convention that helps
them a lot but hurts others very little?


-----Original Message-----
From: Charles F. Munat <coder@acnet.net>
To: Bruce Bailey <bbailey@clark.net>
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Date: Wednesday, January 20, 1999 12:22 PM
Subject: Re: h1, h2, etc.


>Interesting that you should be amused by web pages that
>emulate print documents, but you want to put two spaces
>after periods. As someone else already mentioned, I think,
>the added space is there to increase readability when using
>monospaced typewriter fonts. When using a proportional font,
>the extra space is not used. This reminds me of an English
>professor I once had who insisted that papers be
>typewritten, not printed with proportional fonts, because he
>said the typewritten pages were easier to read. That would
>have come as a shock to a great many experts on type.

Received on Thursday, 21 January 1999 10:06:29 UTC