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A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout for when you need it. In the BÉPO layout this is at SHIFT + spa

A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout for when you need it. In the BÉPO layout this is at SHIFT + space. Especially simple since all double punctuations (:?!; those that require an nbsp before them) are also accessed with SHIFT.

Normille 4y ago
>A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout An even better solution would be --for grown up people who have progressed beyond cave-painting and want to communicate using, you know, actual words-- to be able to disable emojis completely. Fucking moronic shite that they are. I've seen people on Twatter and FB have entire conversations in bloody emojis. Talk about reverse evolution! Why don't we just go back to grunting and gesturing and have done with it?
- benj111 4y ago
  I'm surprising myself by saying this, but emoji are pretty useful in certain contexts. Certainly more useful than the requirement to put a space before a colon, non breaking or not.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  I guess you only speak monotonically and avoid interpreting pitch, pauses, and physical cues in conversation as well, since those would be archaic, right?
  - Normille 4y ago
    smiley face. crying face. row of hearts in different colours. strange yellow thing that might be a banana or an arm flexing its bicep. sports trophy. winking face. My god! --you're right. This is so much better and clearer than using those boring old fashioned words.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Emotions aren't clear either, but there are certain societal expectations to read and respond to them appropriately.
cryptonector 4y ago
A modern solution is to abandon old, no-longer-relevant typographic language rules, or to make typographic language rules context-specific. But I agree that we need to make several alternative space characters easy to type: - non-breaking space (for this French rule) - wide space (for disambiguating sentence ending periods from non-sentence-ending periods) - zero-width non-breaking space (for preventing word-splitting?)
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  What makes the French rules old, no-longer-relevant, invalid? Why should we change language to appease lazy software developers?
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    Not "rules", just this rule. It has to do with typographic considerations that apply to old typesetting technologies that are no longer in use. > Why should we change language to appease lazy software developers? It's been done. For example, in Spanish it is no longer the rule that "ch" and "ll" sort as if they were distinct letters (this change was made in 2010) precisely because that was such a difficult rule to implement. And that was a 256 year-old rule per-wikipedia: The digraphs "ch" and "ll" were considered single letters of the alphabet from 1754 to 2010 (and sorted separately from "c" and "l" from 1803 to 1994). For another example, in Spanish capital letters were required to not carry accents, but now they are allowed to not carry accents. This was due to the use of overstriking on typewriters working to accent lower-case letters but not upper-case letters (apostrophe would collide with the glyphs for upper-case vowels). But the technology to resolve this has existed in the Spanish-speaking world for a long time now, so the rule was finally dropped. (Not accenting upper-case letter can lead to ambiguities that are annoying.) It's not just precedent. It's that the original reason for some typographic (not even orthographic) rule is simply not relevant in 2022. And it's not unreasonable for either French people, non-French French speakers, or just non-French French-non-users to propose the ditching of hard-to-implement French rules. Now, this particular rule is decidedly not difficult to implement, but it is an annoying rule to apply as a user -- I should know, since I speak and write French (though I am not French). Also, it doesn't matter what the French Academy says, or what the Spanish Royal Academy says, or what Webster's dictionary says, or whatever. Language evolves, even to their consternation. Moreover, developers don't have to care that much -- I18N/G11N is fun enough, and employers have to care for legal reasons, but rules like the Spanish ch/ll rule can be much too hard even for non-lazy developers, and the Royal Spanish Academy can and did have to change, and it was for the better.
nephanth 4y ago
Azerty layout could certainly map shift-space to unbreakable space too But honestly, rather than changing keyboards (which is hard), why doesn't Google just pick a shorthand that doesn't break typography rules, like `@` instead of `:`
- zyx321 4y ago
  The : allows users to discover it by coincidence when trying to type a smily :) If triggering it by accident wasn't intended, they could have used a regular keyboard shortcut like Alt+Shift+E or even instruct users to press Win+. to use the system-wide emoji menu.
rich_sasha 4y ago
Better still, why not abandon the space as a character, and render the colon with extra space to the left when locale is French?

Normille 4y ago

>A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout An even better solution would be --for grown up people who have progressed beyond cave-painting and want to communicate using, you know, actual words-- to be able to disable emojis completely. Fucking moronic shite that they are. I've seen people on Twatter and FB have entire conversations in bloody emojis. Talk about reverse evolution! Why don't we just go back to grunting and gesturing and have done with it?

benj111 4y ago
I'm surprising myself by saying this, but emoji are pretty useful in certain contexts. Certainly more useful than the requirement to put a space before a colon, non breaking or not.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
I guess you only speak monotonically and avoid interpreting pitch, pauses, and physical cues in conversation as well, since those would be archaic, right?
- Normille 4y ago
  smiley face. crying face. row of hearts in different colours. strange yellow thing that might be a banana or an arm flexing its bicep. sports trophy. winking face. My god! --you're right. This is so much better and clearer than using those boring old fashioned words.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Emotions aren't clear either, but there are certain societal expectations to read and respond to them appropriately.

cryptonector 4y ago

A modern solution is to abandon old, no-longer-relevant typographic language rules, or to make typographic language rules context-specific. But I agree that we need to make several alternative space characters easy to type: - non-breaking space (for this French rule) - wide space (for disambiguating sentence ending periods from non-sentence-ending periods) - zero-width non-breaking space (for preventing word-splitting?)

Kwpolska 4y ago
What makes the French rules old, no-longer-relevant, invalid? Why should we change language to appease lazy software developers?
- cryptonector 4y ago
  Not "rules", just this rule. It has to do with typographic considerations that apply to old typesetting technologies that are no longer in use. > Why should we change language to appease lazy software developers? It's been done. For example, in Spanish it is no longer the rule that "ch" and "ll" sort as if they were distinct letters (this change was made in 2010) precisely because that was such a difficult rule to implement. And that was a 256 year-old rule per-wikipedia: The digraphs "ch" and "ll" were considered single letters of the alphabet from 1754 to 2010 (and sorted separately from "c" and "l" from 1803 to 1994). For another example, in Spanish capital letters were required to not carry accents, but now they are allowed to not carry accents. This was due to the use of overstriking on typewriters working to accent lower-case letters but not upper-case letters (apostrophe would collide with the glyphs for upper-case vowels). But the technology to resolve this has existed in the Spanish-speaking world for a long time now, so the rule was finally dropped. (Not accenting upper-case letter can lead to ambiguities that are annoying.) It's not just precedent. It's that the original reason for some typographic (not even orthographic) rule is simply not relevant in 2022. And it's not unreasonable for either French people, non-French French speakers, or just non-French French-non-users to propose the ditching of hard-to-implement French rules. Now, this particular rule is decidedly not difficult to implement, but it is an annoying rule to apply as a user -- I should know, since I speak and write French (though I am not French). Also, it doesn't matter what the French Academy says, or what the Spanish Royal Academy says, or what Webster's dictionary says, or whatever. Language evolves, even to their consternation. Moreover, developers don't have to care that much -- I18N/G11N is fun enough, and employers have to care for legal reasons, but rules like the Spanish ch/ll rule can be much too hard even for non-lazy developers, and the Royal Spanish Academy can and did have to change, and it was for the better.

nephanth 4y ago

Azerty layout could certainly map shift-space to unbreakable space too But honestly, rather than changing keyboards (which is hard), why doesn't Google just pick a shorthand that doesn't break typography rules, like `@` instead of `:`

zyx321 4y ago
The : allows users to discover it by coincidence when trying to type a smily :) If triggering it by accident wasn't intended, they could have used a regular keyboard shortcut like Alt+Shift+E or even instruct users to press Win+. to use the system-wide emoji menu.

rich_sasha 4y ago

Better still, why not abandon the space as a character, and render the colon with extra space to the left when locale is French?