Comments on: Blogosphere Showdown: Verizon versus Cable

By: MegaZone

MegaZone — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:50:51 +0000

I still type two spaces after the end of a sentence as well. This was drilled into my by a friend and co-author back in college, around 1990. And it really does make a difference when reading fixed width fonts. As someone who still regularly reads USENet in trn and reads all of my personal email in mutt on a UNIX shell, both with fixed width terminal fonts, I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.

That’s what software is for. For blogging it looks better when I’m typing input, and when it displays it doesn’t matter since HTML collapses whitespace. Any decent office suite will ‘auto-correct’ the double spacing so I don’t worry about it there either.

By: Dave Zatz

Dave Zatz — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:43:24 +0000

About the same time we all threw away our IBM Selectrics. :p

PS That picture was $1 at iStockPhoto – glad you approve. I need to give you a graphics budget…

By: Mari Silbey

Mari Silbey — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:18:10 +0000

+1 for the graphic
+1 for the Highlander reference
-1 for the crack about two spaces after a sentence (seriously, when did that change?)

Total= 1 point for Dave

By: Dave Zatz

Dave Zatz — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:38:26 +0000

Moveable Type is fine too. However, Verizon’s rolled their own solution. Work harder, not smarter!

And Cable’s retort was more convincing, though I’m not qualified to comment on the accuracy of either argument.

PS, It’s the HTML that doesn’t allow two consecutive spaces without forcing it using a $nbsp.

By: Cynthia Brumfield

Cynthia Brumfield — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:24:36 +0000

Yup, my high school typing teacher drilled permanently into my head double spaces at the end of a sentence. Fortunately, Movable Type also corrects for this…will switch to WordPress (and thereby go up in Dave’s esteem) when time permits.

Cynthia B.

By: RandomRage

RandomRage — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:03:33 +0000

I still double-space after sentences as a habit, and because I think it just doesn’t feel right to have a single space after a period. WordPress ignores it, though, and I thought it was a glitch until I did some searching around.