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Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

The space before punctuation thing might simply indicate a European writer. Several countries in Europe do that deliberately and I notice it with a lot of my colleagues.

It's interesting to note also how they appear to use the Fox News trademark while having no apparent affiliation. Also, although I don't know suite numbers, it's interesting that the address on the domain registration looks to be very close to a UPS store.

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Are you sure about that space thing?

I live in Europe and I have been browsing the Internet for 20 years now, and this is the first time I hear about it.

Also, I visit plenty of Eropean news sites, and none does that.

It's a somewhat common error, but I don't think it's ever used deliberately, especially in any professional setting.

It seems to be pretty common among the French at least. I haven't seen it in print media, only from individuals.

In French, no space before a comma or a period (unless want to explicitly communicate your disdain for computery things or you’re above 60) but we do put a space before : ? !

Example: « Pas de palais : pas de palais ! »

(^Quote from the Asterix movie that will be way more useful to you for making French friends in a bar than saying « I can’t speak French » in French)

This is actually a really interesting example of the "space before punctuation" thing rather than " space before punctuation ".

Also: it looks like we're using colons differently, is that right?

We use colons for the same reason as in English, but there is a space before colons in French (Microsoft Word inserts it automatically for you in French), and no uppercase after the colon.

French typographic rules prescribe a space before ‘!’, ‘;’, ‘:’, and ‘?’.

Interesting. I've never realized it. I learned french in school but couldn't remember learning about that.

Example: https://www.gouvernement.fr/argumentaire/parcoursup-la-plate...

To be super-pedantic, the correct character is a non-breakable half-space (unicode 0x202F). It actually makes sense: it shouldn't be breakable, or the text layout would be ugly (the colon starting on a new line?). And it should be reduced in size, because indeed you don't want a full space before a colon...

This article is using the international quotation marks though, proper typography would be to use « and », which also require non-breaking spaces before and after them.

The rule for punctuation is that the nbsp is before the double punctuations, those with two elements (?!;:).

With all due respect, the idea that "several counties in Europe add a space before a full-stop" is bizarre. Which countries? Have you had a look at news media website from those countries to check? At the very most it's a mistake more common in European writers that you've worked with, but I can assure you it's not deliberate. Also note that in the examples given the space before the full-stop also means no space after it, which indicates a misplacement rather than an extra space.

I have a large number of French colleagues, so it's possible I've mistaken it for being more widespread than it really is.

I often see this space before punctuation with Chinese writers of English, though not very advanced ones.

Additionally, some individuals may intentionally include such errors to render themselves more difficult to identify.

Space punctuation is something I see from kbase article writers from India often.

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