[HN Gopher] Space After Periods (1993)
___________________________________________________________________
Space After Periods (1993)
Author : susam
Score : 170 points
Date : 2023-07-10 21:36 UTC (2 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.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > if you have any examples of a website that does
| preserve multiple spaces after periods
|
| Mine does: https://daveon.design/about-dave-on-
| design.html#typography-&...
| 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]
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Since the majority of the text I produce these days is rendered
| as markdown before being shown to a reader, I've taken to putting
| newlines after periods. It makes prose much easier to edit with a
| linewise-thinking code editor, and the reader doesn't notice.
|
| After developing this habit, I now personally find it also easier
| to skim text with the newlines shown because I know that the
| beginning of the line is also the beginning of the sentence.
| nick-of-time wrote:
| Same for me, I write either markdown or latex and both have
| this behavior. In latex it's outright recommended, for ease of
| commenting out or moving sentences.
| glonq wrote:
| Two semesters of touch-typing in the 1980's has cemented two-
| spaces into my muscle memory. I can't shake it; it looks/feels
| wrong to use one space even though I respect the efficiency and
| aesthetics of that.
| [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.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Currently discussed in
| https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/14wn2ld/i_am_going_w...
| crabbone wrote:
| I will write two spaces as long as Emacs has by-sentence
| navigation. I wouldn't care what anyone thinks about it.
|
| I studied printing and typography in particular, as a student. I
| worked in printing and publishing, mostly in a large newspaper
| before I pivoted to programming. I haven't done any work in that
| area since the time Adobe Pagemaker overtook QuarkXPress (around
| the time of G5 and MacOS X). But, I think the principles are
| still valid to this day as nothing really changed in the printed
| text.
|
| So, when paginating a newspaper, the goal is to achieve a
| "pleasant look". This includes a bunch of rules that... sort of
| have some justification sometimes, and less so other times...
| well, here are some examples:
|
| * Don't allow for four consecutive lines to end with hyphens
| because it breaks the visual image of the body of text as a
| rectangle (or whatever other shape that the text was intended to
| flow in). Obviously, four here is a heuristic, and in reality
| will depend on the space between lines, the size of the font etc.
| But, the rule says "four".
|
| * Similarly, don't allow for four consecutive lines to have
| spaces between words align vertically because it creates an
| artifact in the otherwise uniform rectangle filled by text.
|
| * Don't allow for a single line from the previous paragraph to
| start a page / a column because readers want a paragraph to be
| close together as it's supposed to convey a single thought.
|
| And there are many, many more, including the size of dashes that
| should be used in specifying year or time spans, used in math
| formulas as minus, used in direct speech, used as way to separate
| sub-sentences and so on. Unfortunately, these also vary by
| language and country. Sometimes even the prose vs verse will
| affect the preferred length of dashes.
|
| So, when it comes to periods, they can happen in acronyms, in
| initials or to signal the end of the sentence. When they are used
| in acronyms or, and especially in initials / titles, it's very
| desirable to keep the word following the period with the space on
| the same line with whatever preceded the period. I.e. "V. I.
| Lenin" should be treated as a single word, from typographical
| perspective. In practice, in typography, there are "unbreakable"
| symbols, mostly dashes and spaces, and these would be used for
| titles and initials to prevent accidental linebreak from cutting
| through someone's name. In contrast to this, it's highly
| desirable that the linebreak occurs where the sentence ends.
|
| Since keyboards offer limited input capabilities when it comes to
| text formatting, and in order to help editors to present text in
| a more easily digestible way, it seems like putting two spaces
| after a period, if it's meant to terminate a sentence is a small
| price to pay.
|
| My typical way of working with prose in Emacs is that I
| repeatedly ask it to re-flow the paragraph (because of the edits
| I make to it). So, on top of being able to skip number of whole
| sentences in any direction, I would also prefer that the editor
| doesn't break initials off the name, while try to break lines on
| sentence end.
|
| Most computer users today use crippled text editors s.a. VSCode
| or MS Word, which don't offer similar functionality, and so to
| their users double space after period would appear as a
| meaningless chore. I understand that the needs of the majority is
| where it will end in the end of the day, but, personally, will
| never accept this kind of approach.
| staplung wrote:
| I used to be firmly in the one-space camp because my first intro
| to the subject was from Robin Williams _The Mac Is Not A
| Typewriter_. However, at some point -probably one of the regular
| resurrections of this debate on HN - I came across a convincing
| argument that the line of reasoning in that book is wrong; that
| it was actually common for typeset books to use larger spaces
| between sentences than between words and that when the typewriter
| was invented, the two space rule came about because that's what
| people were already used to seeing.
|
| I got so sick of all the arguments from ignorance that I decided
| to get empirical and have taken to examining the type in old
| books to see if there's any kind of consistency as you work back
| in time from the word-processor era to the typewriter era to the
| pre-typewriter-era. The problem is that I don't have access to
| enough old books to come to much of a conclusion.
|
| I have _The Works of Shakespeare_ from 1919 (MacMillan and Co.)
| and it definitely uses wider spaces between sentences than
| between words. This is true both in the fully justified text of
| the preface as well as in the ragged right of the plays.
|
| I also have a Webster's Dictionary from 1937 and it too uses
| wider spaces between sentences than between words. All the text
| is fully justified.
|
| However, virtually all modern books use the same width space
| between words as between sentences. Notice that I'm _not_ saying
| "one space" or "two spaces" because books are typically fully-
| justified and so it can easily be the case that all the spaces on
| a line are much wider than a single space character; it's just
| that the space between sentences is no wider than the space
| between words.
|
| Which brings me to what I feel like is usually ignored in these
| debates: justification. Professionally typeset works that get
| printed are almost universally fully justified. Everything else -
| typical word-processor output, the entirety of the web, etc. is
| left justified. if you're going to write an algorithm for full-
| justification you're going to have to mess with spacing and it
| doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to put a little more space
| between sentences than between words. Although presumably it's
| algorithmically simpler to treat all spaces the same way,
| especially if there aren't great rules for even knowing when a
| sentence ends e.g. "No, I expect you to die Mr. Bond".
| distcs wrote:
| > I used to be firmly in the one-space camp because my first
| intro to the subject was from Robin Williams _The Mac Is Not A
| Typewriter_.
|
| So which camp are you in now? I did a 'view source' on your
| comment. I see you still type with a single space after period.
| So are you still in the one-space camp? Can you share a little
| bit more about which camp you are in and why?
| 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...
| watersb wrote:
| Am I the only one who thought this was about low-orbit adventure
| following menstruation?
|
| Because seriously I did. Thankfully, by the 1990s NASA had a bit
| more experience with female astronauts. A popular story of NASA's
| initial accommodation is entertaining and seemed like legit
| fodder for HN thread:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1102635355/marcia-belsky-that...
|
| https://www.poynter.org/tfcn/2021/did-nasa-send-a-woman-to-s...
| davidmurphy wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-2nd/dp/0201782634
| 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.
| yellowapple wrote:
| My issue with single-space is that it turns programmatically
| parsing out sentences from "pretty simple regex on
| terminating punctuation + (two spaces OR newline)" to
| "tangled mess of heuristics and corner-cases".
|
| Obviously humans can figure this out easily, so I don't
| really notice or care if I'm reading something with single-
| spaced sentences, and it's pretty rare that I need to parse
| sentences... but the moment that need does arise, I'm gonna
| end up judging the hell out of that "personal choice" - to
| say the least.
| distcs wrote:
| What is a use-case for parsing out sentences? I don't think
| I've ever had to do that. So curious when do you need to
| parse out sentences?
| unsignedint wrote:
| While I cannot comment on the specific use cases
| mentioned by the previous person, one example where
| parsing out sentences can be useful is in the context of
| Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools, also known as
| translation memory. As a software engineer in the field
| of localization, I encounter this requirement on a daily
| basis.
|
| In CAT tools, there are well-established heuristics that
| handle the majority of cases, making sentence parsing
| relatively problem-free. For the remaining cases,
| reputable CAT solutions provide features that allow
| translators to merge or split segments, thus
| accommodating various sentence structures. As a result,
| this issue is generally not a significant concern.
|
| It is unreasonable to expect or demand that individuals
| discard their writing styles solely for the purpose of
| text processing, especially when both styles are equally
| prevalent. The blame, if any, lies with the limitations
| of the language itself for not providing clearer
| guidelines in this regard.
| 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
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's funny that such a flippant exchange is actually hugely
| significant for the English language. As most Roman text across
| the World is now consumed via HTML this brief discussion put
| the final nail in the coffin for the double-space-after-
| sentence jig.
|
| The fact that the exchange is recorded is magnificent to me. We
| don't have a written dialogue of the guys who decided to start
| putting spaces in English words in the first place...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so to clarify then HTML in older versions treats all
| whitespace as insignificant but can be overridden in
| combinations of newer versions HTML and CSS when
| interpreted by a browser that understands the styling
| decisions overriding the default behavior?
| cxr wrote:
| > then HTML in older versions treats all whitespace as
| insignificant[...]?
|
| No. It works the way I described.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok well I forgot the PRE tag as CaptainNegative pointed
| out but when you say
|
| >No. It works the way I described.
|
| what you described made reference to white-space: normal
| which is a CSS property that I don't believe is available
| as part of the HTML standard itself (although I don't
| really keep up anymore so I could be wrong) but certainly
| wasn't part of older versions of the spec.
| cxr wrote:
| You are putting undue focus on a parenthetical (that I
| only even put in as a hedge[1] in the first place).
|
| Copy and paste my comment somewhere, delete the
| parenthetical, and then read the result to yourself.
|
| "HTML [...] treats all whitespace as insignificant" is
| simply inaccurate, no matter how you want to constrain it
| (e.g. "in older versions" or not). Whitespace is not
| insignificant.
|
| 1. <https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-
| writing.htm...>
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| The <pre> tag has existed since HTML 2 for displaying
| preformatted/whitespace-sensitive text, and HTML 1 had
| the mostly similar <LISTING> tag (plus <PLAINTEXT> which
| is a little different).
| moffkalast wrote:
| Was it? It continues to be one of the most annoying
| "features" and everything has to be padded with
| instead to get proper alignment.
| 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...
| vintagedave wrote:
| Guido van Rossum writing:
|
| > I think it's mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX
| and troff) that makes people want this.
|
| > Let's keep HTML simple!
|
| was unexpected. Knuth as propaganda!
|
| The discussion noted some O'Reilly books sentence-spaced, and
| layout software had different levels of support with TeX
| notably supporting it. And that's the key: it's a typographical
| layout choice. For document input, for writers, it's a matter
| of markup for the output typographical layout not double-
| spacing per se. It's an aesthetic choice only, similar to the
| spacing we add between letters, around punctuation etc.
|
| So the question is not, should we support double spacing, but:
| should we support this sentence spacing typographical
| technique?
|
| Because double spaces are an hack used to achieve layout they
| should not be necessary, but word processors not supporting it
| leads to people implementing it themselves. (If you're a
| product manager, this is the sort of thing you spot to indicate
| a missing feature.)
|
| It gets worse on the web: because most white space is collapsed
| together the double-space trick doesn't work, and it's _very_
| hard to do in CSS.
|
| Marc Andreessen's 1993 comment 'how is a text widget supposed
| to know where a sentence ends and where it doesn't? That sort
| of syntactic analysis we can't do...': yes, it's hard. English
| parsing is hard. Other languages are hard. I don't believe
| that's a reason not to do it any more.
|
| My website has sentence spacing [1] in CSS as a purely
| aesthetic choice based on a technique by Tom Fine [2, 3]. And
| it's automated: I run the site text, single-spaced, through a
| Python script that understands sentences and marks up sentence
| spacing.
|
| [1] https://daveon.design/about-dave-on-
| design.html#typography-&...
|
| [2] https://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Tech/html-sentences.html
|
| [3] http://widespacer.blogspot.com/
| velcrovan wrote:
| "Some" O'Reilly books aside, any professionally designed book
| published for the last hundred years on the shelves of anyone
| reading this, as well as every magazine and newspaper, uses
| single-spaced sentences.
|
| That HTML collapses multiple spaces is a feature, not a bug.
| It means you can, if you want, double-space sentences while
| authoring/editing your source files and the result will still
| come out "correct" (according to settled practice).
| vintagedave wrote:
| > any professionally designed book published for the last
| hundred years on the shelves of anyone reading this
|
| With respect, that's an incorrect assertion. I have books
| on my shelf published up through the eighties with wider
| spacing between sentences. A more accurate comment might be
| that in the modern design era, and I'd guess this is
| approximately post-WW2 onwards, sentence spacing became
| less common and it is now common or standard not to. That
| clarification is true.
|
| How do I know? I like wider sentence spacing (see my
| comment above on this thread) and have kept an eye out for
| it in books when I buy them.
|
| I suspect it was computers that killed wide sentence
| spacing: the web, as seen in the linked discussion thread,
| combined with word processors that weren't as capable as
| TeX and didn't support it. Here we are thirty years later
| and it's become the absolute norm, so much we can barely
| imagine an alternative. But I regret that technical
| decisions and limitations have left us in this position.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Can you give me some titles?
| vintagedave wrote:
| I'd love to, but most of my books are in storage. The two
| I bought recently as examples of typography are an old
| copy of H G Well's Veronica, which does display sentence
| spacing but is too old to use as an example for you, and
| an ancient book in Estonian printed in German-style
| fraktur.
|
| If it helps I do think the eighties one, and I wish I
| could remember what it was, was indeed an outlier. I'd
| actually love to track down the O'Reilly's books
| mentioned in the linked thread.
| coxmichael wrote:
| Nice site/typography!
|
| The bold and italics look like they're being applied in
| browser though, rather than specific faces.
|
| And it's calling out for some small caps for acronyms like
| 'HTML'.
|
| Nice to see sites with this style, it's very rare nowadays!
| vintagedave wrote:
| Thanks! I agree re the style -- I've attempted to make a
| 'spirit of the old web' (no Javascript, no tracking
| cookies, etc) and text-based, CSS-based site. Essentially:
| communicate what I want to, without the overhead that's
| normal in many sites today.
|
| Yes, both bold and italic are being applied by the browser,
| and I do need to fix that. Italic is a temporary choice
| because I don't like the look of EB Garamond (the current
| text font) in its italic face, and need to find an
| alternative. Bold, though, is not intentional. I've noticed
| the macOS and iOS stacks mimic bold differently, which is
| an interesting thing to have found.
|
| Excellent point re allcaps for acronyms. Should be pretty
| easy to add to the site generator. Thanks for the
| suggestion :)
| 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.
| simiones wrote:
| It's a bit funny because it's actually hard to represent
| Python code in regular HTML, exactly because of this
| collapsing.
|
| For example, here is some Python code typed correctly in the
| comment box but rendered without the code formatting support
| (using a | at beginning of line to prevent the code
| formatting to kick in):
|
| |def foo(flag):
|
| | if flag:
|
| | print("this is indented")
|
| | print("is this?")
|
| If you check the HTML, it looks like this:
| <p>|def foo(flag):</p> <p>| if flag:</p> <p>|
| print("this is indented")</p> <p>| print("is
| this?")</p>
| distcs wrote:
| > it's actually hard to represent Python code in regular
| HTML
|
| It is not hard. Just use the right tag. You want the <pre>
| tag here. Here, fixed it for you: def
| foo(flag): if flag: print("this is
| indented") print("is this?")
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| Have you ever seen a nested control structure?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Perhaps I misunderstood your comment, but this is quite
| wrong. If I have a block that's indented at 8 spaces, and the
| next line is 10 spaces, but should be in the same block, it
| will definitely throw an IndentationError.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, you've misunderstood. If the last line started with 8
| spaces, Python will see a difference between (the next line
| starting with 8 spaces), (the next line starting with 6
| spaces), and (the next line starting with 10 spaces).
| Option 1 does nothing. Option 2 produces a DEDENT token.
| And option 3 produces an INDENT token.
|
| In the same scenario, Python does _not_ distinguish between
| (the next line starting with 10 spaces), which produces an
| INDENT token, and (the next line starting with 50 spaces),
| which produces the same INDENT token. The amount of
| whitespace isn 't relevant. All that matters is the
| comparison between one line and the previous line.
| 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?
| antonvs wrote:
| The period at the end of this sentence is followed by six
| spaces. I bet we won't be able to see them.
| [deleted]
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I see them and they're glorious.
| mcny wrote:
| I was going to say I don't see it but then I opened
| inspect tool and sure enough it is all there.
| <span class="commtext c00">The period at the end of this
| sentence is followed by six spaces. I bet we won't
| be able to see them.</span>
| 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.]
| naikrovek wrote:
| > 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.
|
| my keyboards only have one spacebar, man. that means things I
| type get one type of space, though there can be multiple
| spacebar presses in a row.
| 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: ....
| mr_toad wrote:
| Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number
| of the counting shall be three...
| nomel wrote:
| I recommend that the space bar be broken up into at least three
| space buttons, to make this stance practical.
| perilunar wrote:
| We could use [space], option+[space], and
| option+shift+[space] to give a regular space, an en space,
| and an em space respectively. This would be similar to
| hyphen-minus/en-dash/em-dash, so easy to remember. And it
| could be done in software.
| terom wrote:
| >>> 1, 2 File "<stdin>", line 1 1, 2
| ^ SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier
|
| The reason for `xbd_options nbsp:none`...
| throwaway73454 wrote:
| You are probably joking, but there are typewriters with split
| space bars exactly for this reason.
| 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).
| yellowapple wrote:
| Why three? Only two kinds of space are necessary for the vast
| majority of English-language text: one to delimit words, and
| one to delimit sentences.
| 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.
| mprovost wrote:
| Apparently (according to TikTok) ending a sentence with an
| ellipsis is also a Gen-X thing...
| nick-of-time wrote:
| GenX and older. I get the impression that you read ellipses
| with a very different tone than I do. Ellipses indicate
| trailing off your sentence, especially with suggestive
| connotations [1]. As you can imagine, this is uncomfortable
| to read just as it is to listen to.
|
| [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-kidding-unless
| 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.
| naikrovek wrote:
| no, nor do IM clients in Electron, in my experience. not
| Teams, anyway. spaces are preserved.
| naikrovek wrote:
| same. I don't care if it labels me as old. I am old.
| 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?
| nomel wrote:
| That's my tongue-in-cheek point. None of it is needed,
| but, as my sentence hopefully demonstrated, it all exists
| to make things easier to read.
| santix wrote:
| https://docs.w3cub.com/latex/_005cfrenchspacing.html
| aj7 wrote:
| Twitter killed two spaces.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I learned something interesting about myself here...
|
| I was always in the "two spaces after the period" camp, because
| that's how I was taught as a young sprout. So I assumed that's
| how I still write.
|
| I've been writing and publishing fiction and nonfiction for
| decades and took a quick tour through my work. My early work does
| indeed have two spaces after each period.
|
| But, at some point, I started to shift. I went through a couple
| of years where I was inconsistent about using two spaces or one,
| and after that, all of my writing uses one space exclusively.
|
| I didn't even notice that change in my own writing. It boggled my
| brain a little bit.
| 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.
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| BTW ancient Egyptians didn't use vowels (hieroglyphs
| describe consonants)
| lisper wrote:
| That's true, but ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are only
| phonetic when writing names.
|
| A better example would be modern Hebrew. It has vowels,
| but they are an optional annotation and often omitted as
| a matter of course.
| [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.
| rocqua wrote:
| The therapist - the rapist ambiguity already does that
| no?
| lisper wrote:
| Yes. I just missed it. I guess I have a mental block
| against having utmost respect for rapists.
| throwaway473453 wrote:
| Isit?
| lisper wrote:
| Nicely done!
| distcs wrote:
| I have to say, that is not a great example. Your earlier
| point still holds good that there is enough redundancy in
| English to distinguish these things.
|
| Here "Isit?" means "Is it?" and that is obvious from the
| context.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, that's true, but it's still ambiguous out of
| context, and the fact that it is also a direct response
| to what I said adds some unexpected humor so I give it
| bonus points for that.
|
| It inspired me to come up with:
|
| Fromwhereisitgoodideascome?
| Pannoniae wrote:
| That was ambiguous because I had to really double-guess
| whether it was "therapists" or "the rapists"....
| lisper wrote:
| Ah, I totally missed that. (I guess I had a mental block
| against having utmost respect for rapists.)
| asudosandwich wrote:
| "Sean Connery" also misread it on a SNL Celebrity
| Jeopardy spoof.
| lisper wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hElOag-1a0k
|
| illtaketherapistsfortwohundred :-)
| 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.
| aunetx wrote:
| It's funny because in French, you are meant to put a space
| between punctuation marks if and only if they contain two
| elements.
|
| So you put a space before :, ;, <<, !, ? etc but not before .,
| ,, ..., etc
|
| And I find it wonderful!
| yellowapple wrote:
| > But seriously, how is a text widget supposed to know where a
| sentence ends and where it doesn't?
|
| By scanning for terminating punctuation followed by either two
| spaces or a newline. What's that? You don't use double-spaces
| between each sentence? Sucks to be you! The Man(tm) can pry my
| double-spaces from my cold dead fingers.
|
| And I say terminating punctuation in general (not just periods)
| because there's a growing number of cases of other such
| punctuation occurring within certain proper nouns - for example,
| "Panic! at the Disco".
| 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.
| gdwatson wrote:
| Historically English-language typography, in contrast to French
| typography, used a larger space between sentences than between
| words. Typists imitated this traditional style. The single-
| space style gained typograhic ground through the twentieth
| century, becoming the norm in the 1950s.
|
| Preferring a single space between sentences is a reasonable
| choice. But flagging or "correcting" the two-space style is
| simply a mistake.
| opello wrote:
| > One thing that doesn't get brought up...
|
| Except it was brought up in the 3rd message[0] of the linked
| thread.
|
| > Typists follow the rule of adding an extra space between
| sentences within a paragraph. The rule for books (and by
| extension, anything that does not use a fixed-pitch, monospaced
| font) is to use the same space between sentences as between
| words.
|
| [0] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
| talk.1993q3/0024.ht...
| 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...
| distcs wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Did you switch from two spaces to one space while writing in
| a text editor using monospace font too?
| joegahona wrote:
| > Did you switch from two spaces to one space while writing
| in a text editor using monospace font too?
|
| Yes, I switched to one space no matter what, but my use of
| monospaced fonts was rare back then. Even today I use only
| one space after periods, even when using monospace fonts.
| HN is an interesting case: The input field in comments is
| (I think?) monospace, but the output of posts is Verdana,
| which is not monospace.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| YOVKIDSTHESEDAYSHAVEITSOEASY|ISAYBRINGBACKSCRIPTIOCONTINVAANDMAGI
| SCULETEXT|LETTHEBODIESFALLVVWERETHEYMAY.
|
| (Two-spacer 4evvah)
| 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.
| distcs wrote:
| The humor flew right over my head. Care to explain?
| distcs wrote:
| I'm beginning to doubt if there was any humor there in
| the first place.
|
| > When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
|
| I mean if it had been a French city I could say that a
| pun about French Spacing is there in the joke. But Rome
| isn't a French city. So still very confused if and what
| the joke is.
|
| French Spacing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_
| sentence_spacing#Fr...
| 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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