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The question you should generally ask in such cases is not "what have
we always done (and don't tell me why)?", but rather "what advantage
does doing X add to the process and is that relevant?" Blindly applying
old rules without understanding why you're applying them doesn't help
much, if at all. More often, it simply perpetuates ineffective
practices that are no longer relevant, and conceals an opportunity for
improvement.
The origin of the "two spaces after periods" style appears to lie back
in the early days of typewriters, when we were limited to
non-proportional fonts with fixed character widths. If you've ever had
to read old Courier typescripts, you can see why it helps to add an
extra space at the end of a sentence: it makes the end of the sentence
stand out more clearly. Given that the cognitive science guys and gals
tell us that we don't start assembling meaning until we hit the end of
the sentence, and the fact that the end of the sentence is easier to
spot with the added space, typing two spaces clearly adds value in this
case.
The question then becomes whether this is a valid approach given modern
proportional fonts with variable-width characters. The answer is most
likely that the double space no longer helps; on the contrary, it
increases the number of "rivers" of white space introduced into the
text by any display software that actually displays the extra space
(see below). These rivers are visually distracting and draw attention
towards themselves and away from the text you're supposed to be
reading; add enough rivers and it becomes actively difficult to read.
The problem has to do with "saccades" of the eyes (jumps of your area
of sharp focus from one visual field to the next), in case you want to
research the technical jargon. Fixed spacing makes the saccades easier
and more predictable, thereby increasing reading speed and reducing the
number of times your focus jumps past the end of a word. The reason
typically given for lower readability of fully justified type relates
to precisely this kind of spacing problem: if you aren't using a decent
typesetting engine, such as the one provided by InDesign, you produce
relatively more rivers and suboptimal spacing. InDesign can set fully
justified type every bit as readable as unjustified type produced in
other software.
For some software (including most Web browsers, I believe), the
software simply ignores the double space. Adding the second space thus
accomplishes nothing, other than increasing download times slightly and
increasing processing times to display the page (probably by an
undetectable amount on a fast modern computer). It slightly increases
the amount of typing you must do, thereby increasing your risk of RSI,
and for less-proficient typesetting software (e.g., Word), it creates a
less readable layout. It certainly seems to add no offsetting benefit.
That being the case, why keep doing it?
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