Re: Origin of Ellipsis

This tradition is persistant. You can still easily see many contributors in
English Wikipedia that are continuously "autocorrecting" wiki pages to
insert these double spaces after periods, with comments like "fix
typography"... These edits are massive, sometimes performed by bots.
Well I will never care about reverting these because these extra spaces
have absolutely no effect in rendered pages, but this edits are still a
nuisance as they drain server ressources (computing and storage space).

2013/9/14 Stephan Stiller <stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com>

> Hi Philippe,
>
> This means that this dot will then need to be followed by two spaces when
>> it is used as a sentence-ending period.
>>
> This tradition is no longer current in the US. Though it's obvious there
> are still plenty of middle and high school–level teachers and college-level
> writing instructors teaching this in the US, not knowing that books and
> periodicals in the US haven't been using two spaces after a sentence-final
> period for a long time. Let's see how many decades it'll take for them to
> forget about this; writing folks who lack an eye for common practice can be
> rather obstinate in insisting on what they heard from some authority during
> their childhood ;-) After all, people who should know better still
> recommend Strunk & White on their websites (or CMOS, which is actually
> pretty good, for the most part), despite none of them ever having read
> these works.
>
> Might also have to do with age-old textbooks for classes in touch-typing,
> though the idea that double sentence spacing makes more sense with a
> monospaced font is questionable at best.
>
> (Of course the question whether double sentence spacing is better in
> principle is different from the question what common practice is.)
>
> Stephan
>
>
>
Received on Fri Sep 13 2013 - 21:20:17 CDT