I think both 1 and 2 spaces are generally accepted. Ellipses (plural of ellipsis, not ellipse) with only two periods, however, are not; nor are sentences started with lower-case letters.

This post is brought to you by Padfoot's Inner Grammar Bitch.

I think she is trying to tell us that we are OLD (..and in the way).

Html web pages by themselves don't read more than one space without tricks such as   or blank spacer graphics. So when you write text on the internet (or in this forum) you can't use two spaces. Therefore the proper way to write anything on the internet is with one space after each period.

I never noticed that, I feel like such a noob.

Better a noob, than a nub.

Heh, I've been sarcastic, cynical with a dash of sardonic before I became a teenager - the result of parents divorcing, and being surrounded by idiots from the foster placement I was in.

And don't worry about the hostillity - I've experienced far worse than that - my father is (I think) an ESTJ, with a controlling streak wider than America - and his ideas about my future were different from mine.

I'm sorry, but I simply must object for the following reasons:

1. new medium, new rules

The internet is a different medium for writing which should have its own rules. The way one reads text on a lighted screen is different from a piece of paper. The rules for both style of writing and visual layout should not follow the same rules as doing the same work for print.

2. follow rules for reasons, not just because they're there

The reason grammar and punctuation rules are there is so there will be a standard so written communication will be more easily understood between people. Since html does not acknowledge the spacing rules, following them does not improve communication in any way.

3. following archaic rules is inefficient

You can't see the extra spaces, so you are wasting valuable time adding them. There's no need to even think about how many spaces you need on the internet because no matter how many you add, the end product will only have one.

(I'm just being difficult. I actually do put two spaces after every period in this forum, even though nobody will ever know. It's a habit.)

I enjoyed it, but it seems you are confusing grammer with punctuation in #2.

"Not to cavil or anything..."

Geez, picky, picky. I fixed it.

....|---|.-- * .-|-...|---|..-|- * http://www.babbage.demon.co.uk/morseabc.html * ..--..




Greetings Cloakable. Is your stealth technology for sale? We in the backwaters of the universe don't often have such available.

I don't know; I used to leave two spaces as well, but now I'm beginning to have my doubts about whether or not they are necessary. I know Eats, Shoots and Leaves isn't the authoritative guide to punctuation in the English language - there is no authoritative guide to punctuation in the English language - but I'm quoting it anyway: "Until very recently, typists were taught to leave a two- or even three-space gap after a full stop, but now word processing programs will automatically reduce the gap to a single word space. Semicolons and colons used to have a word space preceding them, and two spaces after, and to be honest, it looked very elegant : but nobody does that anymore."

I don't know about you, but I'm riding the wave of laziness into Single-Space Land for the exact reason that Amy cited: we should follow rules for reasons, not just because they're there.

If you made word-codes that would be shorter than spelling things out, it would help somewhat, but with only two characters available there's not much one can do to add information without adding length.

26 varieties of punctuation would work quite well, but then what would you punctuate with? Regular characters?