Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that rarely does anyone distinguish output format from source format in these discussions?

Two spaces are used to semantically separate sentences in source format. They can be collapsed or modified for typeset output (like HTML rendering), but nobody should be telling an author to use single space in source format if the author wants to add the additional semantic separation between sentences.

Particularly at fault are sanitizers like tidy (not just stand-alone, but sometimes used as a component in document editors) which will collapse multiple spaces by default. They're not doing any other html rendering, and they're not minifying the html either, so why do they insist on removing a common form of semantic content information in the source document? Collapse >2 spaces to 2 in some cases, perhaps, but not 2 to 1, particularly not after punctuation.

The two spaces vs one space argument for how text should be typeset is a completely different issue and unrelated to the question of how many spaces human typists should use between sentences. Using two spaces between sentences happens to make it easier for typesetting software to automatically apply whatever magical 1+epsilon or 1-epsilon inter-sentence spacing it deems best, assuming the typesetting software can deduce that the author is using the two-space sentence convention (otherwise it has to fall back on heuristics, which are not perfect).

Any author is free to choose how many spaces to use between sentences, but collapsing 2 spaces when editing others' documents is wrong, and so is preventing an author from using two spaces. Doing so removes information content from the document, which can only be restored perfectly by humans (or other things with human-level natural language processing ability).

Two spaces are used to semantically separate sentences in source format.

That's the function of the period, which does the job perfectly well already, as you demonstrate yourself.

Any author is free to choose how many spaces to use between sentences, but collapsing 2 spaces when editing others' documents is wrong, and so is preventing an author from using two spaces. Doing so removes information content from the document, which can only be restored perfectly by humans (or other things with human-level natural language processing ability).

I could just as easily argue that it's wrong to include redundant semantic information. If I were to begin using double commas,, should everyone else alter their reading habits to accommodate my affectation? Fuck that.

The part which you omitted is that you can also use a period for denoting an abbreviation. It then can become ambiguous as to whether you're parsing that, or the end of a line. The only way to then determine whether it's an abbreviation is to use some other form of heuristic, which becomes a pain in the ass.

Regardless, we're seriously into Parkinson's Law of Triviality territory. I'll support either way as long as the bike shed has an aluminum roof.

>That's the function of the period,

This breaks in the case of "Mr. Jones went to the store. He enjoys buying things." The spacing after 'Mr.' should be less than after 'store.'. If two spaces are prohibited, you have the following options, neither of them particularly satisfactory:

-The user must input some form of special Unicode space character after 'Mr.'

-The display software must include a list of all words that, when followed by a period, should not include extra space (e.g., "Mr, Mrs, Messrs, etc, e.g, i.e" and so forth).

Says you. I was fine with it being the same when I learned to type (on a typewriter) and having text-presentation software do some micro kerning on certain abbreviations doesn't bother me in the least; automating such drudgery is one of the main reasons to use computers in the first place.

A third option is to dispense with the punctuation marks on abbreviations and simply refer to 'Mr Jones.' This took a little getting used to, but since real grammatical consistency would involve abbreviating 'Mister' as 'M'r,' (a practice which you can see in some older books and which persisted with obscure words like f'c's'le) dropping the period seems simpler. It's good enough for the Economist, whose style guide I prefer.

Consider 'T. S. Eliot'. I guess 'T S Eliot' could give an alternative, but it hasn't gained traction. I'm sure there are more cases.

What's "f'c's'le"?

I would guess (but don't know) that it's forecastle.

It is indeed. Since it rhymes with "voxel", the "fo'c'sle" spelling is a much better one than "forecastle".

Sure is. :)

I'm a read-aloud-in-my-head kind of reader, and I remember really struggling with that one in Moby Dick.

(It's "fo'c'sle," by the way, sometimes even encountered as "fo'c's'le." In the latter case, I wonder why simply writing "forecastle" wasn't the easier choice back in the day).

It's closer to the actual pronunciation of "folk•sel"

In contrast, The Economist's style guide does not use periods after titles like Dr, Mr, Mrs, or Messrs:

http://www.economist.com/style-guide/titles

WTF?? So,, yes,, use double-commas to drive home your point since you must have had some reason to put them there. I will continue to use double space after the end of a sentence for the same reason.

WTF?? So,, yes,, use double-commas to drive home your point since you must have had some reason to put them there.

My point is that you would be quite right to reject writing in which someone employed double commas as an affectation. Just because a writer thinks it says something special does not mean readers have to agree.

My point is that you would be quite right to reject writing in which someone employed double commas as an affectation

Personally, I think writing should be judged mostly on content, not presentation. Sometimes the line can be hard to determine on which is which, but to me that we reject things based on presentation (which we all do), is an unfortunate circumstance of our human nature.

Publishers routinely reject things simply based on presentation for the simple fact that most authors are willing to do a significant amount of the work (that would otherwise be done by typesetters and editors) just to ensure they get published, and it's rarely going to hurt the publisher if the author takes their work somewhere else, instead.

My theory for the mass use of the double space is that it was such a common requirement from publishers at one time (and in some areas probably still is) simply because it distributed a massive amount of menial work and most people can simply make a habit of it and never bother to question or complain about it. Another is that, once taught this particular practice, many people confuse it with the requirement that a document is double-spaced.

to me that we reject things based on presentation (which we all do), is an unfortunate circumstance of our human nature

Not at all. Assuming that the required presentation is well-known (not a secret), and is relatively easy to implement (e.g. doesn't require specialized equipment), what is the reviewer supposed to think of a writer who couldn't follow the instructions?

Among other things, standardized formatting (not commas, but fonts and margins) also makes life easier for the reviewer, for instance letting him/her know at a glance how long a piece will be. And they have to scan many, many pieces, most of them crap.

I'm speaking as a writer who submits stories using standard manuscript format. Writing provides ample opportunity for creativity. I don't need to use my creativity in font or margin or punctuation choice. And it's just not that hard.

If anything, you support my point. That you know you must make the job easier for the reader because otherwise they may not get to the actual thing you are writing about, the content, is exactly what I'm talking about.

In an ideal world, your writing would have just as much chance of being read and appreciated if it were presented in all caps or all lowercase, single spaced or double.

I simply think it's unfortunate, if understandable for multiple reasons, that we don't live in that world.

In an ideal world, your writing would have just as much chance of being read and appreciated if it were presented in all caps

DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT IN AN IDEAL WORLD WE WOULD GIVE AN EQUAL SHARE OF OUR LIMITED TIME AND ATTENTION TO PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T YET FIGURED OUT THAT ALL CAPS IS UGLY, HARD TO READ, AND CONNOTES SHOUTING???

In an ideal world, we wouldn't have limited time, and could make decisions based on the best criteria. Whether someone has figured out the best way to communicate with their audience should have no bearing on whether their ideas have merit. It does matter though, which is obvious. That doesn't keep me from wishing the world was a better place.

I could just as easily argue that it's wrong to include redundant semantic information. If I were to begin using double commas,, should everyone else alter their reading habits to accommodate my affectation?

Do double commas serve some purpose other than a presentational quirk? Double spaces at the end of a sentence have semantic meaning distinct from a single space, as shown by other replies.

I think for your argument to make sense you either need to show that double spaces don't have any special distinguishing characteristic at the end of a sentence, or allow that they do, and double commas to as well, but we're better off without them. Otherwise, I don't really see a relation between double commas and double spaces at the end of a sentence.

The double spaces only serve as a presentational quirk, too. The amount of space after the sentence ends does not determine whether or not it has ended. Most mass-produced material no longer uses longer spaces after the end of a sentence, and websites require CSS or the use of special character entities to produce longer spaces, so it follows that most people do not require double spaces when reading as an indication that the sentence has ended.

The sequence "period space space" is also not reliable for a computer to determine the end of a sentence, either, so in building a lexer you would likely remove the consecutive spaces (outside of content that is marked as pre-formatted) and use some other method of determining whether a period is being used for an abbreviation, the end of a sentence, or some other purpose. In fact, you might even throw out the period, since it is no longer a necessary part of the content (though the parser would add it back in for output in most situations).

The amount of space after the sentence ends does not determine whether or not it has ended.

Let me re-phrase to clarify my point. Double spaces after a period more accurately distinguish the end of a sentence from other possible meanings. See bmelton's comments.

The sequence "period space space" is also not reliable for a computer to determine the end of a sentence

Not reliable because of some other inherent ambiguity, or because not everyone is using double spaces? If you are arguing we shouldn't do it because not everyone does it, I'm not sure how to respond... Is there some other case where a period followed by two spaces is acceptable, and doesn't mark the end of a sentence?

Definitely in agreement on this one. I have a writing app which uses HTML as it's native format, and I've received a number of complaints from people about how it doesn't allow you to use multiple consecutive spaces. I suspect most of them are coming from a MS Word background (the app lets you edit Word documents but converts them temporarily to HTML for editing).

Usually I just explain that this is how HTML works; whitespace is collapsed, and so my app is inherently dependent upon the capabilities of HTML and the layout engine being used (in my case, WebKit).

However after the most recent complaint I finally spent some time looking deeper into the CSS spec and found out that you can set white-space: pre-wrap on a style, which will preserve consecutive spaces in the way that some people are accustomed to in Word. Now that I'm aware of this, I'll be turning this on by default for Word documents when I translate them to HTML, and for documents stored directly in HTML format I'll offer this as an option that can be set on a document-wide or style-specific basis.

I've always seen the one-space vs. two-space argument as a bit pointless, since this is something that is within the domain of what software can handle, for the most part. LaTeX has facilities for adding extra space after periods, for example. The main difficulty is distinguishing between abbreviations and words like e.g. which don't start a new sentence, so you don't want extra space after them. And I'm not aware if any web browser or HTML layout engines which add extra space like LaTeX (which I think is 1.5 times a normal space), but I cold be wrong.

As much as I've been in the camp of "just use one space; what's the big deal?" I think you've raised a very good point that the double-space can be treated as semantic information that instructs the typesetting system to place the surrounding characters further apart, even if it isn't exactly two spaces (and in the case of justified text, giving a greater weight to whitespace specified using two space characters).

TL;DR: white-space: pre-wrap is a handy feature of CSS

Honestly, I think it's neurotic that human beings will receive criticism for, and have to worry about the choice of how many times they tap a space bar when writing (not even coding). That we have to even include things like output format and source format to distinguish between is just on another level entirely (I'm not criticizing you, your point is valid).

I mean, when I read titles like this I think to myself, "Who gives a shit?"...then I read a long thread and think, "Wow, this is actually a real debate."

I never knew there was so much that could go into a decision about typesetting spaces. You learn something new everyday.

Find a reason to write a program that needs to separate prose into sentences, then ask yourself if the argument is neurotic.

It's common to use tables of abbreviations to know when a period is probably not the end of a sentence, and then apply imperfect rules to handle edge cases like proper nouns. It's tedious and inaccurate.

Tough. You will never ever ever convince the world to conform to a rigid standard of two spaces between sentences, so your program is going to have to handle that kind of input.

Granted, any program that has to deal with other writers' text has to deal with both possibilities, but two spaces improves accuracy, both for typesetting and for semantic recognition of sentences for other purposes. Even in a document with a mix of two spaces and one space between sentences, a program can settle a case that would otherwise be ambiguous if there are two spaces. The more simplistic (and inaccurate) your single-space sentence determination algorithm is, the more valuable it is to be able to assume (or assign a high weighting that) a two-space separation marks a new sentence.

I know the world will never universally adopt using two spaces, but that doesn't mean they should get away with making spurious typesetting-related arguments and undoing the work of those who use 2 spaces. If a few more people decide that semantic richness is enough reason to start using two spaces, so much the better.

The problem is that the argument for using 2 spaces was never originally about parsing the text with a computer. Further, even the justification for using 2 spaces in the article is not doing so, either, it's an attempt at justifying using 2 spaces to emulate a typesetting practice (using a single space that was 2 or 3 times as wide as the space between words) which you still would not have expected someone to blindly apply to all text (you might have someone do it to all of the text just so a more experienced typesetter could come along behind them and make the adjustments that required a good eye for the work). Eventually publishers just found it easier to turn authors into apprentice typesetters, and probably found that most of the work they produce isn't worth paying an experienced typesetter to finish with that level of detail (and this attitude also shows in the editing of mass-market material, too). Of course, most mass-market publications use spaces of the same size after the end of a sentence as between words, now, and probably don't do much manual adjustment of the alignment of the text, either.

Additionally, if you assume that "period space space" indicates the end of a sentence, eventually you're going to run into some case where that's wrong, too. It's bound to happen in a world where we routinely teach people to blindly hit "period space space." You may be better off incrementally improving your lexer/parser (or using and contributing to an open source project) and throwing out the excess spaces.

> I mean, when I read titles like this I think to myself, "Who gives a shit?"...then I read a long thread and think, "Wow, this is actually a real debate."

May I interest you in some further reading? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation

For both two spaces and and toilet paper, the heart of the issue is not that it's the slightest bit important, but that one's own preference is always so blindingly obviously correct.

With things that have functional differences, one way is definitionally "better". They can't be the same and they aren't merely aesthetic preferences. ("over" and one-space are proper).

Now you're thinking about the nominal definition of "better", but I think you underestimate the scope of and importance people give to aesthetics.

But none of that really matters because in the next ontological step we question the definition of definitions. [1] And if you look into it, the smartest people in history haven't really gotten any closer to putting debates like these to rest.

[1]http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/definitions/

For example, I butter my bread butter-side up, which is obviously correct, but Zooks prefer butter-side down. Something really ought to be done about them.

For HNers who may have missed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book

I'm truly amazed by both the length of that article, and the number of references.

  bracket_fun(){
      stuff;
  }

or

  bracket_fun()
  {
      stuff;
  }

what, no tabs vs spaces? and is a tabstop 2,3,4,6 or 8 spaces wide?

oh man I learned allman style as a high schooler, and it makes me sad that certain constructs in javascript (return) do not allow you to do this, and that gofmt forces you to use K&R...

I sympathize with you. I learned allman style first because that's what my java programming book used. When I started learning C, which is pretty K&R dominated, I found it really hard but got used to it and now when I go back and look at that java book it's like constantly stalling in a standard shift car.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com