Double space between sentences?

"Chris Beall" <> wrote in message
news:BOGSa.2166$ m...
> I prefer the visual appearance of a double space between sentences.
In
> HTML, I get this effect by placing each sentence on its own line and
> eding it with &nbsp;, thus:
> The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.&nbsp;
> The new line character following the &nbsp; provides the second space
> before the next sentence starts.
>
> This is, however, a STYLE thing, not CONTENT. In today's world it
seems
> that I should just be typing the sentences with a single separating
> space and then applying an appropriate CSS sytle parameter like
> sentence-space: double. I don't see any way to do this in CSS2, nor
do
> I see it over the horizon in CSS3.
>
> Have I missed something?
>
> Chris Beall

OK, what I missed is that (not too surprising) it's been mentioned
before. Concensus seems to be that it is most common for monspaced
fonts, although the specific font that brought this to my attention was
proportional. And it isn't in plan for CSS. They way I'm getting it
seems as good as any.

I got used to this function with a document layout language called
SCRIPT, where it was available, regardless of font. It didn't just work
after periods, but after any of the common sentence-ending characters.
Improved readability, IMO. Oh, well, another wheel that hasn't been
reinvented yet....

Thanks for all the comments.

Chris Beall

Chris Beall

"Chris Beall" <> wrote in message news:<BOGSa.2166$ om>...
> I prefer the visual appearance of a double space between sentences. In
> HTML, I get this effect by placing each sentence on its own line and
> eding it with &nbsp;, thus:
> The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.&nbsp;
> The new line character following the &nbsp; provides the second space
> before the next sentence starts.
>
> This is, however, a STYLE thing, not CONTENT. In today's world it seems
> that I should just be typing the sentences with a single separating
> space and then applying an appropriate CSS sytle parameter like
> sentence-space: double. I don't see any way to do this in CSS2, nor do
> I see it over the horizon in CSS3.
>
> Have I missed something?
>
> Chris Beall


Yes. You missed the thread here last year on this topic, in which on 3
July 2002 I replied with a small contextual quote:

> The rules of punctuation are clear: Two spaces (or a "long" space) after the
> end of a sentence to differentiate it from any other construct which has a
> period at the end of a word (i.e. abbreviations), which have only one (or a
> "short") space. How else is a person supposed to know when a sentence ending
> with an abbreviation and followed by a capitalized word (e.g. a proper name)
> has actually ended?
>

While that argument is silly, it's not the silliest thing in your
reasoning. The points you are missing (deliberately, it seems, since
they have been made adequately clear in this discussion), are:

1. The two-spaces "standard" was deprecated in the 50's with the
advent of electronic typesetting technologies.

2. The two-spaces "standard" is a standard only in the fossilized
minds of academic throw-backs.

3. Those who appeal to authority for support for the two-spaces
"standard" will find nothing whatsoever to enable their attempt to
apply that deprecated, useless, awkward, asinine punctuation mutant to
Web communication. In fact, the HTML standard is to collapse extra
spaces and extra lines.

4. Craving to implement an already-idiotic two-spaces "standard" on
the Web simply because you once-upon-a-time saw it in print media or
learned it in a typing class in the middle of the past century is as
logical as trying to make a flute sound like a piano because you had
piano lessons before learning to play the flute.

> Laziness is not an excuse.

Neither is obdurate ignorance.

---- jerry (WikiWriter lives at http://hytext.com/ww)
Georgie Porgie puddin' pie,
Went and told a little lie.
Now his buddies take the blame,
'Cuz Georgie Porgie names the game.

Jerry Muelver

"Jerry Muelver" <> wrote in message
news: om...
> "Chris Beall" <> wrote in message
news:<BOGSa.2166$ om>...
> > I prefer the visual appearance of a double space between sentences.
In
> > HTML, I get this effect by placing each sentence on its own line and
> > eding it with &nbsp;, thus:
> > The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.&nbsp;
> > The new line character following the &nbsp; provides the second
space
> > before the next sentence starts.
> >
> > This is, however, a STYLE thing, not CONTENT. In today's world it
seems
> > that I should just be typing the sentences with a single separating
> > space and then applying an appropriate CSS sytle parameter like
> > sentence-space: double. I don't see any way to do this in CSS2, nor
do
> > I see it over the horizon in CSS3.
> >
> > Have I missed something?
> >
> > Chris Beall
>
>
> Yes. You missed the thread here last year on this topic, in which on 3
> July 2002 I replied with a small contextual quote:
>
(snip quote)

which those interested can find by Googling (Muelver punctuation "how
else"). There are 64 posts in the thread, which address the issue
extensively and with, um, enthusiasm. The consensus (aside from the one
that folks who didn't agree were idiots) seemed to be that the two-space
convention was not applicable to the web, hence there was no technical
support for it.

In my case, I tend to use the convention by habit, probably because I
was taught that way in typing class. When I looked at the text (Century
Gothic) on a web page I had created and noticed that the sentences
seemed to run together, I applied the old convention, thus alleviating
the problem. That got me wondering if W3C was doing anything in this
area, hence my initial post.

Again, thanks for all of the enlightenment.

Chris Beall

Chris Beall

<snip>
>In my case, I tend to use the convention by habit, probably because I
>was taught that way in typing class. When I looked at the text (Century
>Gothic) on a web page I had created and noticed that the sentences
>seemed to run together, I applied the old convention, thus alleviating
>the problem. That got me wondering if W3C was doing anything in this
>area, hence my initial post.
>
>Again, thanks for all of the enlightenment.
>
>Chris Beall
Someone that speaks with common sense at last!!!

Titus A Ducksass

"Jukka K. Korpela" <> wrote in message
news:Xns93C214F909640jkorpelacstutfi@193.229.0.31. ..
> "Chris Beall" <> wrote:
>
> > I prefer the visual appearance of a double space between sentences.
> > In HTML, I get this effect by placing each sentence on its own
> > line and eding it with &nbsp;, thus:
> > The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.&nbsp;
>
> It doesn't really matter whether you have a line break or a space
after
> the no-break space. Line breaks are generally equivalent to spaces in
> HTML.
>
> > This is, however, a STYLE thing, not CONTENT.
>
> Yes. But to handle it in CSS as currently defined, you would have to
> add quite some markup, e.g. make each sentence a
> <span class="sentence">...</span>
> and use span.sentence { padding-right: 1ex; } or something like that.

Not that it's likely to happen, but this could be a global formatting
characteristic, just as Font is. Once specified, perhaps tied to <body>
it would be inherited throughout the page.
Sentence-space: single | double
The browser would honor this request by examining the current language
and applying the appropriate criteria for determining end-of-sentence.
No need for the user to <span> each sentence. This would require some
pretty spiffy sentence-detection logic; as I recall, IBM made it easier
by adding the requirement that the sentence end with a New Line, which
is contrary to HTML syntax.

But my fingers can type &nbsp; almost automatically, so it's somewhat
moot.

Chris Beall

Chris Beall

"Chris Beall" <> wrote:

> Not that it's likely to happen, but this could be a global
> formatting characteristic, just as Font is.

It would be _very_ different from font issues.

> This would require some pretty spiffy sentence-detection logic;

That's really an understatement. There is no possibility of reliably
detecting sentence boundaries automatically without including some sort
of semantic analysis.

> But my fingers can type &nbsp; almost automatically, so it's
> somewhat moot.

Another problem with that is that it works. There's no way the user
could disable it, if he seriously dislikes it.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

Jukka K. Korpela