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One Space or Two?

Ah, the endlessly hilarious fight over whether it’s proper to put one space after a period or two.  The debate gets people quite upset.

See here: https://melmagazine.com/people-really-hate-being-told-to-put-only-one-space-after-a-period-c47e2e81787c

Really?  Such insults over the use of the space bar?  Well, I’ll let you in on an open secret:

It hardly matters.

Why?  Well, because our most important information can be found on web sites, which are rendered in HTML.  HTML ignores extra spaces.  That’s right.  You can put as many spaces as you like between a period and the next sentence and the viewer’s web browser will only display one.  Generally the only way to get an extra space somewhere is to use the HTML entity to display a non-breaking space.  That looks like this:

 

So, people like myself who learned on a manual typewriter and had the double-space thing pounded into our muscle memory can double-space away like mad and it doesn’t matter.  Problem solved!

…thus endeth the lesson…