[HN Gopher] Space After Periods (1993)
___________________________________________________________________
Space After Periods (1993)
Author : susam
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-07-10 21:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (1997.webhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (1997.webhistory.org)
| jononomo wrote:
| [flagged]
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Look very closely at these:
|
| One. One.
|
| Two. Two.
| sogen wrote:
| Look at me!
|
| One. one.
|
| Two. Two.
|
| It's just a blank Unicode character
| lolinder wrote:
| This example actually renders for me as triple space--the
| Unicode character you're using is at least as wide as two
| spaces in and of itself.
| jey wrote:
| I see a U+2800 BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK as your second
| "space". It looks like 6 unfilled Braille dots.
|
| User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7)
| AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0
| Safari/537.36
| jononomo wrote:
| They both have one space. This forum eliminates double spaces
| after periods that end a sentence, thereby degrading
| readability.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's not this forum, it's the default behavior of HTML
| unless you specifically opt in to significant white space,
| which few sites do because it has a tendency to create
| spurious newlines unless the code is maintained very
| carefully.
|
| I'd be very curious to know if you have any examples of a
| website that _does_ preserve multiple spaces after periods
| --I would suspect that in most cases where you think that
| is happening, it 's actually because the font handles the
| extra space.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-
| space
| jononomo wrote:
| Okay, so apparently, HTML has chosen to degrade
| readability, which is a bummer.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Whether it's a bummer or not, the point is this is how
| every website has worked for the last 30 years.
|
| I find that if you look closely at old books, the spacing
| is pretty variable. I have one book by my desk from 1895
| and the spacing after a period is more like 21/2 normal
| spaces, but I have another book from 1978 and the spacing
| after period is basically identical to the spacing after
| a word. There's not much consistency from book to book.
| jononomo wrote:
| Yeah, it makes sense for HTML -- there is no easy way to
| differentiate sentence-ending periods from other periods.
| This is just one of those things that gets worse as
| technology improves. Another example is phone connections
| -- phone connections used to be fantastic, and they
| worked even when the electricity went out, but now we
| have cell phones, which commonly have terrible
| connections and are dependent on electricity. Just
| another example of how advancing technology degrades the
| user experience in order to achieve other efficiencies.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| In general, technology makes things worse but cheaper.
| :-)
|
| A book printed with letterpress is nicer than a laser
| printed book, and an illuminated manuscript is even
| nicer! There are some technology shifts where the new
| thing is strictly better, like DVD to Blu-Ray, but the
| majority of the time you have give something up to move
| forward, like losing the ability to record when we left
| VHS behind.
|
| AI is going to really accelerate the trend by being
| really bad at a lot of tasks, but good enough to make do
| with.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Like, it's part of the html specification if I'm not
| mistaken. It's not like HN is doing this deliberately.
|
| Fuck. I don't even know what I'd have to do if I wanted to
| fake it... is there a double-width space in Unicode?
| sogen wrote:
| Yes*
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36675856
| [deleted]
| Izkata wrote:
| You want non-breaking spaces for this. They're the same
| width as a normal space, but don't collapse together in
| HTML.
|
| I once encountered a bizarre bug caused by a user whose
| keyboard was somehow configured to automatically insert
| these if they added two or more sequential spaces.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space
|
| Unicode A0 is embedded in my mind because of that.
| Groxx wrote:
| When you start talking _sizes_ rather than for a
| _purpose_ , most of them are "what fraction of an em are
| they": https://unicode-explorer.com/articles/space-
| characters
|
| An "en space" (half-em) is pretty close though: https://e
| n.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#/media/...
|
| And web browsers muddied the water a lot, since rendering
| two spaces is generally done _by rendering two spaces_ ,
| unless you're on the web and then have to do something
| special (some people do! is pretty common).
| Personally I think _this alone_ is the biggest influence
| that trained generations that one space is the majority
| and therefore the most correct.
|
| ---
|
| I wish they called the zero-width spaces "non-space", so
| we could have both (non-breaking space) and &zwsp;
| (breaking non-space).
| [deleted]
| kstrauser wrote:
| I have to admit that this is one of the most arrogant things
| I've read recently. Congratulations!
| showdeadplease wrote:
| [dead]
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| quotemstr wrote:
| I usually use two spaces after the end of a sentence because
| doing so helps my text editor distinguish sentence boundaries
| from abbreviations.
| taeric wrote:
| I thought I was specifically taught that this is why you do two
| spaces. It isn't that you need two spaces after a sentence, per
| se; but the system has an easier time knowing to do inter
| sentence spacing instead of title if you do that.
|
| That is, Dr. Smith should have less spacing. I'm guessing there
| are so few things that that applies to, that most systems that
| care can just hardcode it nowadays?
|
| Further, I thought any typesetting system would play with the
| spaces after words to make things pleasant. That is, a space
| isn't a set width in any typeset thing. That really only became
| a thing with typewriters.
| thristian wrote:
| The other day I discovered a font called Elstob that has an "Old-
| style punctuation spacing" mode that (among other things) adds
| significantly more space between sentences:
|
| https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/
|
| The documentation for that feature says[1]:
|
| _When Spacing is set to 1, the spacing between words and
| sentences and around punctuation marks is a good match for most
| books printed in the late eighteenth century._
|
| [1]: https://github.com/psb1558/Elstob-
| font/blob/c9af23d3cbadf111...
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I would like to see a greater tolerance for different
| preferences. I like one space, but totally fine for some people
| to use two spaces.
|
| It's not their problem if I stab my eyes out with a pencil when I
| see two spaces.
| [deleted]
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Imagine having not just two spaces but a whole damn line to
| emphasize the pauses in text:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of...
|
| If two spaces causes you to stab your eyes for this I demand no
| less than seppuku
| GavinMcG wrote:
| That seems like an unfortunate tool to have discarded. Right
| now, I can use vertical separation to structure text, but
| horizontal separation.... Well, that's far more limited.
|
| Within sentences, there's the dash--either em or space-en-
| space, depending on where you're from--and there are plenty
| of other structural options. _Between_ sentences, you 've got
| the ellipsis, and that's it. The way they're used in the
| Declaration, in place of paragraph breaks, is helpful even
| when you're not just trying to save space--for example, to
| structure a list of short words or phrases without creating
| the visual separation from the text that comes with using
| separate lines.
| ChristianGeek wrote:
| An ellipsis should never be used between sentences; you
| should be using a semi-colon.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| No, that's the whole point I'm making. A semicolon is no
| better than terminal punctuation in creating _visual_
| horizontal space, which is a tool for communicating
| semantic structure, but one that we never use. I am not
| speaking to what is grammatically proper, but rather to
| what is possible outside of current accepted usage.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Fully justified text must drive you insane!
| unsignedint wrote:
| I have no issues with people exercising their personal choices
| when it comes to the number of spaces after a period. However,
| I found it to be quite annoying when they began complaining
| about my preference for a single space and asserting that their
| method of using two spaces is more correct than mine.
| Ultimately, I've come to the realization that this is more akin
| to a matter of personal belief rather than a technicality. It
| seems nearly impossible to bridge the gap and find a consensus
| on this issue.
| zrail wrote:
| [flagged]
| Rhapso wrote:
| As an engineer with fermi estimation in mind:
|
| Is 10 guaranteed to solve all problems? 99% confidence it will?
| How much does it cost in weight budget to add some 9s to that?
| Oh wow tampons are light. 100 it is then.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Good first estimate! The next step is introspection:
|
| > Why don't I know the answer to this already, even within an
| order of magnitude?
| Rhapso wrote:
| Everybody around me who would find utility with them has
| non-normal usage patterns (birth control, PCOS,
| hysterectomy) so there is a pretty high variance in my
| observations (across individuals and time) and I don't need
| to actively seek more samples. I just make sure there is a
| box of tampons around and borrow one to use for wound care
| when I need one and replace the empty box when requested.
| DanielKehoe wrote:
| I'm Daniel Kehoe, and I participated in the brief www-talk "Space
| after Periods" discussion thirty years ago (as Daniel Miles
| Kehoe).
|
| I wrote a blog post three years ago, "Personal History:
| Punctuating the Web (1993)," that offers more context and
| perspective on the discussion [0].
|
| We discussed this on Hacker News three years ago when Microsoft
| Word began flagging double spaces after a period as errors [1].
|
| That brief discussion thirty years ago still seems to arouse
| strong feelings for people.
|
| Today, looking back, I'm mostly amused that Guido van Rossum (the
| developer of the Python programming language) wanted web browsers
| to collapse multiple spaces to a single space after periods.
| Python, notably among programming languages, treats whitespace as
| significant.
|
| [0] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-
| punctuating-t...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22975299
| slowwriter wrote:
| To be fair, HTML treating all whitespace as insignificant was
| absolutely the right call
| cxr wrote:
| It doesn't treat all whitespace as insignificant. It does, by
| default (for contexts where `white-space: normal` is in play)
| collapse how sequences are displayed--namely, that they
| appear just as if a single space had been used.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| > _the developer of the Python programming language wanted web
| browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space_
|
| Those would be _trailing_ spaces, not the whitespace Python
| considers significant (indentation).
| lolinder wrote:
| Indentation was very much included in the discussion, but you
| have to go back to the q2 page:
|
| http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
| talk.1993q2/index.h...
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| I don't see a mention of indentation there. Just:
|
| > _I would like to specify that multiple spaces be
| interpreted as such_
|
| The response is only
|
| > _Isn 't it a violation of the SGML philosophy_
|
| This seems more relevant:
|
| > _spaces and tabs at the starts of lines are ignored, and
| extra space after punctuation is handled separately_
|
| http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
| talk.1993q2/0470.ht...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > looking back, I'm mostly amused that Guido van Rossum (the
| developer of the Python programming language) wanted web
| browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space after
| periods. Python, notably among programming languages, treats
| whitespace as significant.
|
| It does so by collapsing any amount of space into single INDENT
| and DEDENT tokens, so I'm not sure what the irony is supposed
| to be. If the last line started with 8 spaces, Python will not
| distinguish between the next line starting with 10 spaces and
| the next line starting with 50.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I heard about this issue back in the 80's talking to a friend
| doing an early WYSIWYG word processor development project.
| Typeset, proportional spaced, yes, same spacing between
| sentences and words, and if you eyeball typeset books from the
| precomputer era, that's what you will see.
|
| I also looked it up in Chicago Manual of Style, and one thing I
| remember is, you want to get your hands on an earlier edition
| (for geek fun) because they have much more detail about
| typesetting than they do in later editions. (I don't know what
| the edition sweetspot is but I found a 1930's copy and I liked
| it)
|
| > _mostly amused that Guido van Rossum...wanted web browsers to
| collapse multiple spaces to a single space...Python...treats
| whitespace as significant._
|
| this is actually pretty funny, thank you
| GoofballJones wrote:
| I learned to type on typewriters in the late 70s. I was
| thrown in a typing class in high-school and I thought to
| myself "this is a useless class, I'm NEVER going to ever need
| this". Turns out it was one of the best things I learned in
| high-school.
|
| Anyway, I never used double spaces after periods. My typing
| teacher would always give me grief for it, but for whatever
| reason, I just never did it. As you can see, I still don't.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I was thrown in a typing class in high-school and I
| thought to myself "this is a useless class, I'm NEVER going
| to ever need this"._
|
| Interesting, given that I specifically sought out typing
| class in high school in the late '70s because I was
| confident that there was going to be a lot of keyboard
| usage in my future, might as well learn to use it.
|
| And I don't want to hear whinging about subtle mechanical
| keyboard differences. When you learn at an under-funded
| rural school with manual typewriters, you also learn to
| appreciate _anything_ that isn 't making your fingers do
| mechanical printing. :-)
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > As you can see, I still don't.
|
| I don't think we can. Or can we?
| perilunar wrote:
| Spaces are significant, but now we have unicode, we can stop
| thinking about the _number_ of spaces and start using the correct
| unicode character for the _type_ of space we want. Unicode has at
| least 16 different types of space character.
|
| As an experiment, here is some text with differing spaces. I
| wonder if HN can handle it:
|
| En space between sentences: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
| consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent eu ullamcorper mi, id
| dictum nibh. Pellentesque fermentum efficitur viverra. Ut
| tincidunt ut nunc non viverra. Nunc accumsan ultrices libero ut
| efficitur. Vestibulum a eros a urna vestibulum tempor. Ut vel
| sodales tellus. Aliquam enim velit, varius eget mi ut, blandit
| dictum nulla. Quisque non malesuada felis. Duis sit amet sapien
| at risus efficitur fermentum. Aenean posuere tempus elit, nec
| eleifend tellus bibendum a. Suspendisse potenti.
|
| Em space between sentences: Pellentesque semper sed enim a
| rutrum. Suspendisse iaculis laoreet leo, a tristique lorem
| tincidunt id. Ut lacinia, sem a sodales fermentum, leo diam
| elementum elit, vitae egestas risus velit non magna. Curabitur
| nec ligula quis sem imperdiet rhoncus sit amet a lorem. Donec ut
| risus sapien. Aenean et nisl quam. Aenean nec interdum metus,
| quis vulputate enim. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum
| primis in faucibus. Nunc pulvinar molestie imperdiet. Etiam non
| nisi id leo blandit placerat vel ac ligula. Duis in urna quis
| erat dignissim pellentesque hendrerit sed sapien. Pellentesque
| tempor magna eu lacus laoreet tempor. Fusce nec tortor sed urna
| placerat bibendum eu id mi.
|
| [edit: no, it can't. They work in plain HTML, so I guess the HN
| form is converting them to plain spaces.]
|
| [edit, the second: try html entities [removed] -- doesn't work
| either.]
| kortex wrote:
| > start using the correct unicode character for the type of
| space we want.
|
| but why
| nutate wrote:
| from NASA: Space exploration helps to address fundamental
| questions about our place in the Universe and the history of
| our solar system.
| Terretta wrote:
| This made me curious whether HN collapses dashes as well. These
| all render the same in the text entry box:
|
| - hyphen
|
| - n dash [option -] or [Alt + 0150]
|
| -- m dash [option-shift -] or [Alt + 0151]
|
| Also, these render as 3 spaces or single space wide in the text
| entry box:
|
| ... three periods
|
| ... ellipsis [opt ;] or [Alt + 0133]
|
| EDIT: So the - - -- work, and can visually suggest what should
| be happening in one's typography if you do _not_ double space
| after sentence ending punctuation.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _... ellipsis_
|
| One slight annoyance I have on my Mac(s) is that if you have
| an ellipsis following by a period, you can tell the
| difference between the two. I would think it's more proper
| (?) that all the dots transparently flow together: ....
| nomel wrote:
| I recommend that the space bar be broken up into at least three
| space buttons, to make this stance practical.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I was going to say you need 5 space buttons to chord all
| possible spaces, but I guess you can use 3 space buttons in
| combination with ctrl, (alt|option), and (win|command).
| cwbrandsma wrote:
| 16 types of space characters...but I don't want to think that
| hard.
| jerf wrote:
| The good news is, you don't have to think _that_ hard. A
| number of them are language specific, or very specific to a
| particular context.
|
| The bad news is, with European languages having the longest
| tradition of printed word, they also still have quite a few
| varieties.
|
| And in a 2023 where even today I can get oohs and aahs from
| multi-decade white-collar professionals when I show them that
| you can automatically generate a table of contents for a
| document if you just use the "Header 1" and "Header 2"
| formatting stuff correctly, I can't imagine a world where
| people are routinely entering _multiple types_ of spaces
| typographically correctly.
|
| (Which type of space is the best to use when holding the
| space bar down to center something, anyhow?)
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Explains the lack of emojis
|
| _sews thread_
| [deleted]
| Axien wrote:
| Gen-X here. I was always a big fan of two spaces - because that
| is the way I was taught.
|
| One day, a millennial woman in the office commented an email was
| from an old person. I asked how she knew. She said two spaces
| after a period.
|
| That point forward I was a one space person.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > That point forward I was a one space person.
|
| You shouldn't fold so easily. She gave you a compliment,
| anyway.
| patrickmay wrote:
| You'll have to pry that second space from my cold, dead muscle
| memory.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| It's already been done. Almost all email content read through
| web browsers these days, which do exactly that.
| mturmon wrote:
| pls also refrain from initial caps and message-terminating
| periods
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| Edit: -
| nostrebored wrote:
| in many contexts punctuation is as unnecessary as an extra
| space between sentences
| nomel wrote:
| iwouldclaimthatspacesandpunctuationareneverneededandcomprehen
| sionismoreaproblemofpracticeratherthanability
| taeric wrote:
| Turning our language into a comma-free code feels... less
| than ideal. Doable, for sure. But why?
| santix wrote:
| https://docs.w3cub.com/latex/_005cfrenchspacing.html
| aj7 wrote:
| Twitter killed two spaces.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is a continuation of a discussion on a different page about
| spaces and tabs in HTML documents [0]. It's actually a much more
| interesting discussion than this title and the tail end of this
| conversation would indicate, hinging on a disagreement over
| whether white space has semantic meaning or is purely
| presentational.
|
| Terry Allen from O'Reilly argues that white space is significant
| to the meaning of the text and therefore needs first-class
| support in HTML, even outside of PRE. Others emphatically
| consider white space to be a formatting issue that has no place
| in HTML, which they feel should be _entirely_ presentation-
| agnostic.
|
| Interestingly, a couple of times people mention the possibility
| of building in support for TeX and other markup languages to fill
| the need for precisely-formatted documents. Specifying the
| presentation of HTML in a separate file (what we know as CSS)
| doesn't appear to be on anyone's radar yet. I wonder what the web
| would look like today if that had been the route we took.
|
| [0] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
| talk.1993q2/index.h...
| lisper wrote:
| Howcananyonearguethatwhitespacehasnosemanticsignificance?
| [deleted]
| patrec wrote:
| Fortran programmers can!
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| Funnily enough, I can still understand your message without
| white space, it is just harder to parse. Doesn't that
| undercut your statement?
| lisper wrote:
| Being harder to parse is not a trivial detail, it's the
| whole ballgame. Written language has a lot of redundancy.
| That's one of the things that makes it work. The redundancy
| makes it an error-correcting code so that the information
| doesn't get dstryed by miner errers. That is what allows
| you to glean the meaning of a message even without
| whitespace. Y cn d th sm trck by lmntng vwls (u o eiiai
| ooa).
|
| Just because you don't completely destroy the message by
| eliminating whitespace doesn't mean that the whitespace
| wasn't semantically significant.
|
| [UPDATE] Whitespace is actually a pretty modern innovation,
| and it is not universal. In old manuscripts the text is
| often allframmedtogetherlikethis. Also, even in modern
| German it is common to compose verylongcompoundwords.
| KMag wrote:
| See also: segmentation in many Asian languages.
|
| Back around 2006, there was an internal collection of
| quotes from senior Google engineers. There was one from a
| guy working on a particularly thorny issue with Russian
| search. He had just finished a project on Thai
| segmentation, and his response to how things were going
| with Russian was something like "Great! At least they
| have words!" (Obviously, he was being deliberately
| imprecise and understood that obviously Thai has words,
| just not whitespace-delimited.)
|
| On a side note, the Korean alphabet is well-designed. In
| particular, teaching children syllabification rules is
| trivial. Syllables are pre-arranged into squares.
| Unfortunately, the lack of distinction between r-l, and
| p-b-f, and restrictions on consonant clusters makes it
| unworkable as a replacement alphabet for English.
| [deleted]
| squirtlebonflow wrote:
| ivegottogivemyupmostrespecttotherapists
|
| Doesn't that undercut yours?
| lisper wrote:
| The real trick would be to come up with a string that is
| actually ambiguous without whitespace. That turns out to
| be surprisingly challenging.
| throwaway473453 wrote:
| Isit?
| lisper wrote:
| Nicely done!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I actually added a DVI (TeX) renderer to Mosaic in 1993 (while
| working at US CS&E). NCSA/Marc wasn't interested in the patch.
| If the server said the document was MIME typed <the correct
| type for DVI>, the regular page renderer was bypassed and code
| that I ripped from ... not sure where ... drew into the browser
| instead.
| mproud wrote:
| No big deal, just some random Marc Andreeson and Tim Berners-Lee
| comments...
| kmoser wrote:
| Plus some rando named Guido van Rossum.
| mantella wrote:
| Until today, I never put it together that Guido van Rossum
| (python) and Just van Rossum (LettError) were related, though it
| makes total sense in retrospect. _mind blown_
| someweirdperson wrote:
| Do whatever you want, but DO NOT put space before punctuation
| marks. With the exception of space before smileys that are
| substituting punctuation.
| JohnFen wrote:
| And don't use smileys as substitutes for punctuation.
| ianburrell wrote:
| One thing that doesn't get brought up is that there is a
| difference between typewriter and word processor. One space works
| best in proportional fonts with typeset work. Two spaces work
| best in monospace fonts like text editor. The reason is that in
| typeset, the space after periods is wider than space between
| words, while in monospace need to put extra space to distinguish
| sentences. I think that some of the conflict comes from when and
| where people learned the rule.
|
| Before computers, people used typewriters and were taught to use
| two spaces after period. Typesetters knew to use the right space.
| Early computers were mostly monospace. Word processors introduced
| variable fonts and were smart enough to collapse two spaces.
| Email and text editors were monospace. The web made everything
| proportional and collapsed two spaces to one hiding any
| difference in source. One space has won enough that people use
| one space in monospace text.
| joegahona wrote:
| This is covered in the "The PC Is Not a Typewriter"[1], by
| Robin Williams. (No, not _that_ Robin Williams.) I adjusted
| from two spaces to one back in 1999 or so, when I read this
| book, and the adjustment wasn 't as painful as I thought it'd
| be. I learned on a typewriter in the late '80s.
|
| For some reason, Stephen King uses two spaces between _each
| word_ in his Tweets.[2] Not sure if this is some statement he
| 's making or a technical glitch.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/PC-Not-Typewriter-Creating-
| Profession...
|
| [2]
| https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1678579628686946304?s...
| Groxx wrote:
| Here's your annual reminder that anyone that says X decision is
| wrong is wrong, and has been for something like 150+ years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing
|
| There has never been consistency here. Vote with your fingers,
| space stuff however you want.
|
| And don't consider web tech to be a _typographical_ decision, it
| 's just the only technically feasible option if you want to make
| something whitespace-amount-agnostic so people can indent their
| html.
| sjoerger wrote:
| "Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want."
|
| I believe this is why I see an increasing lack of punctuation
| or capitalization in online discourse.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You would be surprised by how often people ignore those on
| their verbal discourse.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| I'm told it's because the period is considered passive-
| aggressive. I assume it's too formal final; maybe The Kids
| These Days hold out hope that a sentence might not really be
| over? At any rate whoever got the McDonald's account embraces
| it wholeheartedly.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Only when sending a one-sentence text, where the beginning
| and end of the sentence are clearly the bounds of the text
| itself. You see periods still between sentences of multi-
| sentence texts. Sometimes other markers are used like
| ellipsis or emoji.
|
| I really genuinely like this change for orthography. The
| feel & sound of spoken language is highly sensitive to the
| context and formality: you talk differently giving a speech
| than you do at dinner with your family etc. It's cool that
| we're adapting the written forms to more completely express
| the full range of formality that we actually produce
| written language in now.
|
| The details of orthography are all just convention and
| tradition anyway. As much as it pains prescriptivists and
| peaked-in-high-school wellactually pedants the true
| language is the spoken and writing is merely a tool we use
| to represent it. These additions make writing a more
| complete & capable representation.
|
| And from a more CS view it's cool too. We've hijacked
| sometimes-redundant punctuation to convey nuances of tone
| and intent. Essentially increasing the "bandwidth" of
| writing.
| asplake wrote:
| Similarly for bullet points - no full stop required.
| robnado wrote:
| I used to put two spaces after sentences because people told me
| it is the correct thing to do. Now I put one space after a
| sentence because different people told me it is the correct
| thing to do. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
| kortex wrote:
| > When in Rome, do as the Romans do
|
| IOVMEANISOVLDRITELIKEDIS?
| skipkey wrote:
| For years, I kept my wifi with the passphrase "This is my
| passphrase. There are many like it, but this one is mine."
| Without the quotes of course. With two spaces after the
| period.
|
| At this point I am not going to overcome forty years of
| muscle memory. I assume whatever tool is doing the rendering
| will make things right according to the current convention.
| kbutler wrote:
| Hopefully two spaces after /each/ period!
| mannykannot wrote:
| Bravo! I like your subtle sense of humor - i.e. not so subtle
| that it goes right over my head, but barely.
| Narishma wrote:
| > Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want.
|
| I prefer tabs to spaces myself.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Off the island with ya.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| And so it begins...
| kmoser wrote:
| Yes, but do your tabs indent by two, four or eight spaces?
| patrickmay wrote:
| My tabs insert spaces.
| mwcremer wrote:
| No, no. Set your tab stops to one space. Problem solved.
| Izkata wrote:
| I once jokingly suggested a compromise of 3 spaces, then
| got curious. Turns out I like it more than 2 or 4, and now
| use it for all my personal stuff.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've seen house programming styles that mandate a tab is
| 3 spaces, as well as 5. Personally, I have no dog in this
| fight at all. I'll follow whatever the house style is.
| groovy2shoes wrote:
| Just enough spaces to reach the next tab stop.
| kmstout wrote:
| Fibonacci tab stops!
|
| - https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3m6yhd/fibonacci_
| ind...
|
| - https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/171031/inden
| t-y...
| butlersean wrote:
| despite what many pedants will have you believe, unlike many
| other languages there is no central authority of how english
| should be spoken or written. there isnt even a correct spelling
| of words.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
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