Hello World

Welcome to my first posting about sentence spacing.  Why am I here?  It has a lot to do with that horrible Slate article by Farhad Manjoo almost two years ago telling us all his poorly informed, pedantic, and condescending opinion about sentence spacing.

I'm not a typographer, I'm a software engineer.  Nevertheless what he was saying went against everything I thought I knew on the subject, which at the time was not much.  So I decided to learn about more about the subject.  It's turned into a bit of an obsession, and I'm starting to become a bit of an expert on the subject.  I've set up this blog to document my research as it continues, and to counter the myths put forth by people like Mr. Manjoo, who are unfortunately quite numerous.

But I also see quite a few people like me out there, who think this "one space" movement is just a bunch of pedantic control freaks on a joy ride.  And no, I'm not going to make you use "two spaces" (a phrase that only demonstrates people's misunderstanding).  Sentence spacing is an aesthetic and functional choice, not some kind of rule or law of typography.  The very notion is ridiculous

In the past, I've written a couple of articles about it—How Many Spaces at the End of a Sentence, and Sentence Spacing in HTML and CSS (both of which give the reader dynamic control of the sentence spacing). Since then I've learned a thing or two.  I've started an effort to improve web technology to make sentence spacing practical in HTML.

I also hope to improve support in Blogger for marking and formatting sentences, and give it the same dynamic sentence control I used in my older web articles.  I see that right now, Blogger preserves the extra space I'm typing between sentences, although unfortunately it does it via the awful   entity.  (Worse, it puts the entity second, which shows as a slight indentation where sentences start at the beginning of the line.)  It's a start, but it's hardly adequate.

So yes, this is it's a tiny little niche, but I've already got several postings in mind.  Follow along, and let's see what we can dig up.