Comments on: Two spaces https://grey-panther.net/2006/12/two-spaces.html Just another WordPress site Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:32:48 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 By: Anonymous https://grey-panther.net/2006/12/two-spaces.html#comment-890 Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:32:48 +0000 https://grey-panther.net/?p=948#comment-890 We had to do that when I did my university degree (in 1994) – now I find it really hard to not put in double spaces.

]]> By: Anonymous https://grey-panther.net/2006/12/two-spaces.html#comment-889 Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:27:56 +0000 https://grey-panther.net/?p=948#comment-889 That was (and still is) a typists’ convention. It’s a bit beside the point on the web, since browsers pay little attention to white space. You could using space + non-breaking-space to simulate what typists do, but it’s not clear that’s worth the bother. Besides, a sprinkling of nbsps is fairly “unsemantic”.

Printers’ conventions for spacing are also pretty much irrelevant on the web. Printers use hair spaces, em-spaces and en-spaces. But browser support for all these is problematic.

http://alistapart.com/articles/emen/

All this has nothing to do with “semantics” – meaning – anyway, and is irrelevant to, for example, a blind person browsing the web. If we were pay more attention to whitespace than we generally do on the web, we’d really want to shift our conventions out of the HTML and into a CSS stylesheet – so that people who have no use for all this don’t need to take extra mark up (since their user agent doesn’t have to download the stylesheet).

]]>