> 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.
“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).
> 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.
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.
In addition to that it only ever has been an English typographic tradition. The option to turn it off in LaTeX is called \frenchspacing for a reason. It could be \worldspacing as well.
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 :)
> 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/