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We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an editor at O'Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions with extr
by DanielKehoe 6y ago
We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an editor at O'Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions with extra space after a period. Marc Andreessen (still at NCSA in 1993) pointed out browser developers couldn’t do the syntactic analysis required to distinguish the end of sentences from inter-sentence periods. Guido van Rossum (working on Python version 1.0 at the time) weighed in on the whitespace issue and complained “it’s mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this.” We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh?
[1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.h...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...
- ohazi 6y agoWow, that webhistory mailing list archive is quite the treasure trove...
- DanielKehoe 6y agoI got to thinking more about this and posted an essay to my blog [1]. Looking back, I wonder if browser developers could have applied the algorithms that Tex uses and perhaps web pages would look slightly more elegant. We take for granted the world around us. Web browsers work a certain way; web pages display the same space between sentences as between words. We forget that many things we take for granted are the product of a social process (or “social practice” as Mao Tse-tung famously said). In this case, something you probably took for granted (and probably never even thought about), was the product of a brief discussion in the summer of 1993 among developers who each had their own beliefs about what was right and good. Reading the archives of the www-talk mailing list reveals how part of our world came to be. [1] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-the-web-1993/ https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-t...
- k1w1 6y agoThe very next comment thread is about unreasonable load that web crawlers create. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0001.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0001.ht... Great proposal from Nathan Torkington that search engines be called "Josie and the Pussycats". Somehow Larry and Sergey didn't get that memo.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoSo that's why that happened. Typographically, I don't think you can compare the visual effect of an extra period in properly rendered right-justified text with the effect when it's buried in the usual ragged-right default on the web. In the early 90s most monitors didn't have the resolution to handle full justification without making it look like crap. In theory it would have been helpful if there had been enough foresight to consider the situtation >20 years later. Because those neat margins look really nice. In practice full justification would have used significantly more memory and processor power and would have been much slower. So although it's a shame we ended up with ragged right as the default, it's only become practical to consider high quality implementations - not just budget hacks - of more polished formatting in the last few years or so.
- bottle2 6y agoI don’t know. It sounds like you’re older and smarter than I, but whenever I see two spaces at the end of a sentence, I fix it to make it one space. It looks plain wrong to my brain
- Retric 6y agoDouble spacing between paragraphs is surprisingly helpful with smudged text on physical paper. Many linguistic conventions seem arbitrary, but are really about redundancy. Punctuation could have replaced spaces.just like capitalization of the first letter in a new sentence,it’s helpful to make things as obvious as possible. Is that period a typo or are those supposed to be different sentences?
- JadeNB 6y agoIt basically did, except the other way around: punctuation was originally used where we would use spaces now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#Western_Antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#Western_Antiquity
- grawprog 6y agoWhen you're reading a several hundred page technical report, those double spaced periods are really helpful for picking sentences out at a glance. You don't tend to read those in order from start to finish. There's a lot of jumping around, highlighting things, writing notes. Having sentences be easily visually distinguishable at a glance when scanning a page is fairly helpful. It's kind of like trying to read tons of code with or without syntax highlighting.
- snarfy 6y agoThank you for this! I've been complaining for a long time this is why it happened - browsers eat white space.
- oilrefinery 6y agoWhy couldn't the browser just render the same number of spaces that were in the HTML code? If the code had 1 space then render 1 space on the page, likewise for 2 spaces.
- dqpb 6y agoSince someone must, I’ll go ahead and propose we instead use a single tab after periods if it’s the end of a sentence. :)
- amelius 6y agoWe should have gone with 1.5 spaces as a compromise.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- oconnor663 6y agoOr a slanted space, like a mezuzah.
- fortran77 6y agoOnly for Ashkenazim/Chasidim. Sephardi and Mizrahi hang them vertically. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-slanted-mezuzah/ https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-slan...
- plorkyeran 6y agoDespite it being called "double spacing", TeX's inter-sentence spacing is actually only about 1.25x the inter-word spacing (before justification stretching is applied, at least). The argument is really just over whether or not the space after a sentence should be wider than the space after a word, and not how much wider it should be if so.
- Skunkleton 6y agoWhy compromise when you can do both? With three spaces everyone wins!
- f137 6y agoI'm not sure extra space after a period is a convention in TeX, meaning it is added only when required by aligning text, not after every period.
- cpach 6y agoAFAIK it is indeed a convention in TeX, and LaTeX. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/tags/frenchspacing/info https://tex.stackexchange.com/tags/frenchspacing/info
- michaelcampbell 6y agoNot sure if you mean if it's convention to put an extra space in the source input or the rendered output, but 'extra space' (as opposed "an extra space character") is definitely rendered in the output.
- Gaussian 6y agoA-ha! Another consequential web outcome decided in Urbana-Champaign. As an engineer and a writer, I have monitored this debate for some time. Editors of mine have usually lobbied for two spaces, while engineers I’ve worked with say, simply and reasonably, browsers reading HTML deprecate the extra space, so why bother? Now we know why. Thank you for the fascinating inside story. The traditionalist in me, however, the part that still enjoys a paper newspaper, will always prefer the luxuriousness of the double space.
- svat 6y agoOne of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do: > I think most books don't do this any more [have wider spaces between sentences]. Newspapers certainly don't. It's way too much trouble escaping out all the abbreviations. If you need wider spaces between sentences you also don't want them indiscriminately after every period, so you need to exercise more care and indicate them differently in the input markup. For example, using two spaces: This is a sentence. This is another. Dr. Smith wrote in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. about NASA. It was good. Or in TeX, which makes the typical case easier by using the heuristic that a period after a lowercase letter ends a sentence, you need to indicate wherever this heuristic fails (you can also use ~ to prevent a line-break): This is a sentence. This is another. Dr.~Smith wrote in Proc.\ Amer.\ Math.\ Soc. about NASA\null. It was good. Having to keep track of which periods are ends of sentences is a bit inconvenient in the general case, which explains why wider inter-sentence spacing was given up first in newspapers, then low-quality mass-publishing, then finally high-quality printing as well (almost). But typographers today (see my other comment) make it seem like this has always been the case and wider spaces was just a quirk from typewriters somehow!
- mcguire 6y agoNote: You should use nonbreaking spaces (the ~) in many places where they are often not used.
- JadeNB 6y agoWhen?
- pxx 6y agoWait, what's the \null for and shouldn't there be a \ after Soc.?
- svat 6y agoYes there should be a \ after “Soc.” Proofreading the typeset output might have caught this error. :-) The “\null” after “NASA” is to show an example where the heuristic fails in the other direction: the “.” after the uppercase letter won't be considered to end the sentence, so you need to either type `\hbox{NASA}.` or `NASA\null.` (where `\null` is an abbreviation for `\hbox{}` i.e. an empty box) or something like that — something so that the period doesn't immediately follow an uppercase letter.
- taeric 6y agoThis doesn't paint python in a better light to me. Two spaces is not so that you render two spaces, it just made it easy to distinguish the end of a sentence. Calling it mostly propaganda just shows even then the python crowd got strings of the day wrong. Is also why two line feeds indicates end of paragraph. Works way easier than requiring container markers. Disagree? Just look at in house Java projects to see how many screw up the doc thinking they did multiple paragraphs. And yes, that is the same thing. Books do not have extra space between paragraphs. It is a stylistic choice, period.
- Groxx 6y agoHow much of the book spacing is to save physical space? A fair number of larger / more expensive books that I have on hand, and nearly all non-fiction (especially technical) ones, do have additional space between paragraphs. Potentially all the paperback novels I have within reach do not, though, agreed. They also have far smaller margins, tighter spaces between lines, and thinner paper.
- taeric 6y agoNot sure that matters. My point was that it was a frugal markup. You don't do two spaces because you want more space, per se. You do it to signal a period at the end of a sentence. Similarly, we don't ever start a paragraph with spaces. Very common to indent opening paragraphs, though. Why don't we space at the first sentence? Because we already have a clear marker for that. To that end Word is correct to flag two spaces. In all views. Because it is a wysiwyg. You are not writing a markup, you are seeing the rendered target.
- Groxx 6y agoIf people are double-spacing on a wysiwyg, doesn't that imply it's not frugal markup?
- taeric 6y agoThey are using markup where they shouldn't be. If, in word, I type italic text using stars, that just means I'm wrong in that context. Similarly, if I use escapes, such that I expect \n to add a new line, I'm just wrong. That doesn't make it less useful where it originated. Edit: I amusingly had to try twice to get the italic text there. Double stars did not bold. I don't know how to escape the stars.
- Groxx 6y agoAnother piece of evidence in favor of "the debate rages" (though IMO more in favor of double-spacing): if typographers were even slightly unified in this, you'd see period-double-space ligatures that render as period-single-space. Instead, I'm not aware of any common fonts that do this.