Am I ressurrecting this article? Can’t tell because I can’t read the date …
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Don’t get me started on milk containers.
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I shouldn’t have to do that. How many non-geek people with failing eyesight know to do that? Also, doesn’t work on safari in IOS.
Finally, there are scads of sites that resist expanding the body text when you do that – the rest of the page can get so ludicrously enlarged that all the formatting is broken, but the ant-sized font you want to be able to read stubbornly resists getting significantly larger.
Sometimes I really, really want to go to Silicon valley and infect everyone there with some kind of degenerative eye disease. And replace all their giant retina-grade 4k monitors with 13" 1280x800 screens.
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Yes, hinting is another technique that serves a similar role.
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You shouldn’t have to lock your doors or wear your seatbelt or manually flush the toilet or go to the dentist twice a year. And yet, here we are!
…and of course this is part of the reason for the modern convention that extra space after a period is a sin greater than comic sans. Because neat blocks of text without gaps are more important than additional signaling of the end of a sentance.
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I’m glad this is being addressed as a top-down issue, as it surely is, now more than ever. The web is populated to a significant degree by websites that are built by non-designers putting Squarespace and Wix sites together, or dropping in a ready-made Wrodpress theme. These are, more often than not, the websites of non-profits, government outreach offices, and other critical services that reach out to people with a high number of people reading text on computers they don’t have much knowledge about, or that they don’t own (library, etc…) and are older, and have less access to high quality vision correction.
These programs putting these sites/publications out are also cash-strapped and allergic to spending money on design. At one time, this meant actually that these sites would acutally be more readable, as they weren’t built in Flash, and didn’t have fancy gunk gunking them up. But now, we have project managers with no design sense assigning their “web capable” employee to “make it look nice.” which to the non-professional means: follow the trend, use a popular-looking theme, and don’t tinker. They are relying on a vague sense of whether something “feels right” (read: they recognize it as a popular design mode) to judge whether it looks “finished” or “professional”.
The ideas of accessibility and readability being integrated into design need to come from these same avenues. J.Q. Public making a website doesn’t have the clout to make these decisions, those with influence in the design world need to embrace this to allow it to filter down.
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Great, thanks, now I’m gonna spend all day paranoid about grues.
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There is a little axe here.
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That’s not a “modern” convention, it’s a reaction to a typist’s convention — and one that wasn’t even taught to all typists — that unfortunately has carried over into the “modern” era, with its proportional fonts and typographers who agonise for days over how much space to put around a period and design it into the font. And which some peeps who were taught to type with a double-space after the period can’t let go of, raising the convention to the status of natural law and ancient, gods-given tradition. It just ain’t so.
And it annoys typesetters, layout artists and other graphics bods who have to take them out so that there aren’t conspicuous gaps in the text which normal readers will stumble over. So please don’t do it.
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??
If you’ve got a web browser with a “responsive design” mode, you can edit that color value (0,0,0,0.8) and watch the text change. If you increase the last value to 1.0. It becomes “none more black.” As alpha is decreased, it’s blended with more of the white background and starts to become more gray-- until it disappears entirely. If alpha is 0.8, it means the author’s words are already subtly gray-- as in keeping with the web design decisions that the author claims to despise.
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Naw, I’m not only going to continue to do it, I’m going to do my best to visit hellfire and damnation on any typesetters, layout artists and other graphics bods who remove my highly intentional, cognitively functional conspicuous gaps in text.
My text is for readers. Not visual arts people. Artists need to stop sabotaging my medium. This is the whole thread in a nutshell.
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That is often stated, but repetition doesn’t make it true.Wider spaces between sentences predates the invention of the typewriter, although it was usually something like an em-space instead of an en-space rather than a double space. History of sentence spacing - Wikipedia
Page Under Construction
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The writers have discovered the !
Oh Shit! Says Humankind…
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Thing is, unless you make a living reading type-written text all day, you rarely see anything that has double spaces after periods. Books and magazines don’t do it, ads don’t do it (except when they’re designed by inexperienced designers, or aliterate ones who have been given period-double-spaced copy), even HTML doesn’t let you do it unless you can be arsed to type all the time. 
For nearly everyone else, it is deeply weird to read period-double-space ending sentences, and looks wrong.
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That is a dangerous suggestion to make considering recent trends in punctuation use.
Reactions will be mixed, but will probably fall into one of two categories:
best.
formatting.
ever.
or,
I.
can’t.
even.
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An em-space still isn’t the width of two en-spaces, though. And ever since the movable-type days, typesetters and fonts have the extra space built-in, so it’s really not a thing that’s necessary anymore, and arguably was never necessary even when copy was actually written on that bygone mechanical marvel, the typewriter.
…like coöperate or resumé or even 'bus, I would say that it is certainly an unfashionable throwback. But it is NOT due to monospaced typewriters.
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