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0 pointsjerf15y ago0 comments

HTML ended that. I have followed all periods with two spaces in this post. How can you tell on the screen?

In fact I just checked, and HN is honoring the two spaces, in that they are output to the actual HTML sent to your browser. And of course, yes, there were other trends that would have ended this anyhow, "two spaces" in meaningless in a non-monospaced font and ever more stuff is going proportional as the computing power necessary to do that continues its steady march from "prohibitive" to "trivial", but the WWW certainly beat the corpse to death again.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

nitrogen15y ago· 1 in thread

The monospaced or proportional fonts aren't the issue; it's that HTML treats all sequences of whitespace within text as a single space. It's quite annoying to those of us who like our double-spaced sentences. When a word processor generates HTML, every double-spaced sentence ends with this:

  [space]&nbsp;

Or even this:

  [space]<span class="something-about-space">[space]</span>

jerfOP15y ago

HTML and proportional fonts are two separate issues. HTML ignores them, which is one problem; two spaces in a proportional font being less immediately obvious than on a typewriter is another problem. You can come up with some other issues too if you think about it. It all adds up to a dead tradition.

caf15y ago· 1 in thread

It is not meaningless in a non-monospaced font; two spaces should still be wider than one space. I use a double space after a sentence in all of my technical writing, and I'd be extremely disappointed if my wordprocessing package did not honour that.

eru15y ago

LaTeX would not honour it. But you can ask it to treat the end of sentences different than regular spaces.

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