The article glosses over monospace fonts, and leads with Assange, quite possibly for Google News juice, before admitting on page two that it's just a convention

The article glosses over monospace fonts, and leads with Assange, quite possibly for Google News juice, before admitting on page two that it's just a convention preferred by lots of typographers for proportional fonts. In proportional fonts, a single space is better, although monospace uses two after a full stop and after a colon. This is is to prevent "rivers" and make it clearer where one sentence ends and another begins. I type using two spaces, because a lot of what I type ends up rendered monospace (emails, comments in code, etc.). The nice thing about HTML, though, is that when I view the source, it's usually monospace, but the document will be rendered with a single space, and usually in a proportional font. (I know GMail and Google Groups hate monospace, so a lot of source code and diagrams look unbearable. There were ways to fix this, but I abandoned GMail last year; the Buzz debackle was the last straw in a long line of straws like its lack of threads. That's a different story, though.)