&ensp in a monospaced font

mrcakey wrote:

Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in text?
I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the conventional
2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a

full stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters. Since
you aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense of
nostalgia isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace font
to display your pages), there isn't any reason to have two full-width
spaces after a full stop.

"Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote

mrcakey wrote:
Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in text?
I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the
conventional 2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a full
stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters. Since you
aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense of nostalgia
isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace font to display
your pages), there isn't any reason to have two full-width spaces after a
full stop.

Both my alma mater and my erstwhile employer mandated the use of two spaces
after a full stop. You'll also see it in many books and magazines.

+mrcakey

mrcakey wrote:

Both my alma mater and my erstwhile employer mandated the use of two spaces
after a full stop. You'll also see it in many books and magazines.

Old typewrite habits must be hard to break! Like folks who hit TAB to
lead off paragraphs...

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

Except for the few white space characters for which collapsing is
specifically required, whether *any* character collapses is
unspecified.

That's nonsense and you know that.

Yet I'm not going to worry that some day a new browser
version will display "bookkeeper" as "bokeper".

Or as "fhjidsgyuh98erswygt98". This has nothing to do with whitespace
handling. Read the statement in the spec I mentioned. Its intent is not
hard to see.

The point is that space characters cannot be expected to result in any
specific amount of spacing, despite the fact that some of them are
defined as "fixed-width" spaces in character code standards (and
no-break space isn't, by the way, and it's the one we are usually
talking about in this context).

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

On 2008-03-03, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:
[...]

3) Whether em spaces, en spaces, or no-break spaces collapse is
explicitly declared unspecified in HTML specifications. In practice they
don't, but if IE 8 or Firefox 4 starts collapsing them, you can only
blame yourself if you relied on their not being collapsed.

CSS specifications (CSS 2.1, 16.6.1) do say that the only things that
get collapsed are U+0009, U+000D, U+000A and U+0020. That is to say,
TAB, CR, LF and ordinary space.

The stuff between tags is thought of as anonymous inline elements so
this does cover everything.

Scripsit Ben C:

On 2008-03-03, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:
[...]
3) Whether em spaces, en spaces, or no-break spaces collapse is
explicitly declared unspecified in HTML specifications. In practice
they don't, but if IE 8 or Firefox 4 starts collapsing them, you can
only blame yourself if you relied on their not being collapsed.

CSS specifications (CSS 2.1, 16.6.1) do say that the only things that
get collapsed are U+0009, U+000D, U+000A and U+0020.

CSS specifications (or drafts - note that the document you cite says "It
is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress")
cannot trump HTML specifications. HTML does not "need" CSS, still less a
particular version of CSS.

What you cite applies to the white-space property, and it specifies
certain processing of the characters you mention. I don't think the text
describes what may or may not happen to other space characters.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

mrcakey wrote:

"Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote in message
news:632fhrF25fi31U2 (AT) mid (DOT) individual.net...
mrcakey wrote:
Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in text?
I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the
conventional 2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a full
stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters. Since you
aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense of nostalgia
isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace font to display
your pages), there isn't any reason to have two full-width spaces after a
full stop.

Both my alma mater and my erstwhile employer mandated the use of two spaces
after a full stop.

In what context? Typewritten material? If not, why couldn't they have
been operating under the same misconception as many other people if they
insisted on perpetuating the convention after students and employees
started producing word-processed material in proportional typefaces?

You'll also see it in many books and magazines.

Which ones? I just looked at a selection of books and magazines and this
isn't true in any of them. If you see them in some places, keep in mind
that in some books and magazines, spaces are highly variable in width
because they are used to produced full justification of the content, so
be sure you are looking aren't just looking at lines that required a
great deal of extra space to fill out the width of the text.

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

Except for the few white space characters for which collapsing is
specifically required, whether *any* character collapses is
unspecified.

That's nonsense and you know that.

Oh. Where does it specify that any particular non-space characters don't
collapse?

What's your justification for "and you know that"? If it *is* nonsense
and I *know* that, why would I write it?

Yet I'm not going to worry that some day a new browser
version will display "bookkeeper" as "bokeper".

Or as "fhjidsgyuh98erswygt98".

Exactly. Unless special treatment is specified, I assume unremarkable
treatment: each character is displayed

This has nothing to do with whitespace
handling. Read the statement in the spec I mentioned. Its intent is not
hard to see.

You noted elsewhere that HTML exists without regard to CSS and that the
CSS specifications don't affect the rules for HTML. Likewise, character
sets, fonts, and Unicode exist without regard to HTML, and I would
expect that whenever HTML doesn't specify otherwise, text will be
displayed in the prevailing manner, which, as I observed above, at least
IMO, means that each character is displayed, and they aren't arbitrarily
collapsed. Maybe that's not the way things will always work, but to me
it seems a reasonable understanding.

The point is that space characters cannot be expected to result in any
specific amount of spacing, despite the fact that some of them are
defined as "fixed-width" spaces in character code standards (and
no-break space isn't, by the way, and it's the one we are usually
talking about in this context).

I understand that that pertains to a proportional font. It seems to me
that with a monospace font, it is a reasonable expectation that each
character, space or otherwise, take up the same space, largely because
such ability to align text is one of the reasons one uses a monospace
font, and people expect it to work this way. If someone sees fit to
implement a display medium where monospace isn't really monospace, well,
so be it, but I don't see any point in doing that, and the reasons for
not doing that seem clear to me.

Harlan Messinger wrote:

Yet I'm not going to worry that some day a new browser version will
display "bookkeeper" as "bokeper". I think it's taken for granted that
characters not arbitrarily collapsing with each other is the norm, and
only situations where they do collapse need to be articulated explicitly.

<ot> Are there other English words that contain a consecutive triplet of
doubled letters?


--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
Blinky: http://blinkynet.net

Harlan Messinger wrote:

mrcakey wrote:
Just out of interest, what is the logic behind collapsing spaces in
text? I'd love to be able to display a document I'd written with the
conventional 2 spaces after a full stop.

It has never been conventional to have two full-width spaces after a
full stop anywhere but on pages produced on monospace typewriters. Since
you aren't using a monospace typewriter (and unless your sense of
nostalgia isn't similarly leading to your prescribing a monospace font
to display your pages), there isn't any reason to have two full-width
spaces after a full stop.

I understand all of that. But, for those of us who learned to touch
type in 1963 it's nearly impossible to break the habit of hitting the
space bar twice after a period.

--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be
misquoted, then used against you.