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Argh! It’s not my fault, I was brainwashed as a child. I try to keep it down to just one space but I can’t help myself. I’m the victim here!


Do you also press space twice after a period in Java-ish languages?


Personally, in comments I do that yes.

I think the end of sentence space looks much better with two than one in monospace font, but I'm not especially bothered either way. When there is one space, it looks more like an abbreviation.

I'm mindful that if I do that in shared code, some people will decide I'm incompetent, old or something worse (instead of reading the actual code; people can be petty), so I'll modify my writing style to please others.

This HN comment has double spaces after the end of a sentence. Not that you can see it.

I think it's a shame HTML ruined the possibility of typographically pleasing sentence spacing that looks distinct from abbreviations. Way back, I used to add wider end of sentence spaces in HTML when running it through generators (like Markdown to HTML).


You did a great job in that comment, though :)


It's just how HTML is rendered, you'll never know whether OP used 1 or 2 spaces in that comment.


If you look at the comment through the Hacker News API, there's two spaces before the last sentence.

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?pri...

Although, the documentation says that field is HTML, so I'm not sure what to think.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API


Same in the HTML markup.




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