was she trying for irony?

[cellio]

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation sounds like a great book for grammar nerds, but I am put off somewhat by the 1.5 punctuation errors in the title. (One is debatable and might be excused by context (it refers to a joke containing the phrase); the other is clearly wrong.)

Comments

Re: ampersand?

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

When writing webpages, I always put in two spaces, and just deal with the fact that HTML takes the extra one out. When working at it professionally, though, I actually got taken to task for the single space by a client. I told them that I could go through and add the extra character code to artificially add the extra space, but it'd take me a while, and it would have to be done in all their webpages, or they could live with it. They chose to live with it.

Re: ampersand?

[cellio]

When writing webpages, I always put in two spaces, and just deal with the fact that HTML takes the extra one out.

Me too. It's just part of the idea that you don't (or really shouldn't expect to) control rendering; your HTML source is a hint to the browser, but if you're trying to do fine-grained control, you're probably approaching it wrong. HTML (and even moreso XML) is about separating content from rendering; it should work on a high-res display or on a 15" monitor at low setting, and (ideally) on a PDA as well. Web designers who try to craft magazine-style web sites are doing a disservice overall. Unfortunately, a lot of stuff crept into HTML early on that makes it easy to do that kind of web site, and Microsoft Word isn't helping matters. But anyway, my source always has the two spaces, and if the browser wants to change that, well, it's allowed.

Re: ampersand?

[eub.livejournal.com]

Do you know if there's any standard way in HTML to express "this is a sentence-ending space"? Failing to give the typesetter that distinction from an interword space is unfortunate. IIRC, it would not even be compliant for a browser to give that interpretation to period-space-space.

Re: ampersand?

[cellio]

Do you know if there's any standard way in HTML to express "this is a sentence-ending space"?

I'm not aware of any. I think the only way to give the browser stronger hints about the spaces you want is to use the   special characters, which is a royal pain in the tush (and makes your source border on unreadable, though I suppose you could write a transformation script if you cared that much).

Re: ampersand?

[eub.livejournal.com]

And I would think that doing it that way gives the browser no compliant way to render your sentence-ending space as inter-word length, so it's the same problem in the other direction.

Re: ampersand?

[cellio]

Yup. The problem needs a semantic solution, which AFAIK doesn't exist in the HTML definition.