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There's something kooky going on with that page. I think the CMS used for that site must be substituting one type of space character with another in Unicode, o
by apotheon 16y ago
There's something kooky going on with that page. I think the CMS used for that site must be substituting one type of space character with another in Unicode, or something like that, so that the browser does not "know" how to collapse the two whitespace characters into a single whitespace character.
When I copy the two whitespace characters between sentences there into separate text files that contain nothing but those whitespace characters, then `diff a.txt b.txt`, the result is that they differ, so there is definitely some difference between the two types of whitespace characters used between sentences.
I've written a text formatting tool designed to preserve multiple whitespace instances on the Web. It used ` ` for the first of every pair of standard single space characters. Apparently, this CMS is doing something similar, but even tricker because it doesn't show up in the source as an HTML entity, and perhaps less well thought-out because for some reason the nonbreaking version space character used is the second of the two (which results in weird ghost-spaces at the beginnings of lines sometimes, as you discovered).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- haberman 16y agoHmm, interesting. Whatever it is, it also happens for me in Gmail, so perhaps Gmail does the same thing. It's in Gmail that it really bugs me.
- haberman 16y agoIndeed, performing a hex dump, the second space seems to have been replaced with 0xc2 0xa0, which is UTF-8 for: U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE character Which is the same as HTML entity  
- apotheon 16y agoThanks for taking it a step further. I was to lazy to go that extra mile. Well . . . several keystrokes, anyway, plus a Google lookup.