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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Sword of Good - Less Wrong
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...and, amazingly enough, FictionPress doesn't allow me to include double spaces in my writing. Deal-breaker in my book, so I'm giving up and hosting on yudkowsky.net instead. Can anyone suggest a better place to post in the future?
The Chicago Manual of Style recommends against double spacing. Do you have a particular attachment to it?
I usually despise double spacing. It bloats the length of the next unnecessarily. (Though I do admit that I didn't even notice it in this case.)
Let me amplify: By "double spaces" I mean two spaces after a period, not double spaces between lines.
Web browsers automatically condense double spaces to single spaces...
That is also what I meant, and what the CMS discourages. See double spacing at the end of sentences. While it does come down to personal preference, if there is any standard web convention it is toward single spacing.
Regarding double spacing:
In the Old Days, type writers (and even the first word processors) did not add an extra half space after the period to separate the end of a sentence and the beginning of the next one aesthetically. It became convention to leave two spaces after a period and this was the proper thing to do.
But now that proportional fonts leave the aesthetically "correct amount" of space after a period (something between 1 and 2 spaces), it is incorrect to try to force two spaces.
When I use the words "correct" and "incorrect" I mean in the context of conventional writing. It's up to each person if their writing is a little bit more like a poem than prose, in which case they can bend convention as they wish.
As an expert on what is aesthetic -- like everyone else- - I'll comment that the FictionPress font does not provide enough of a gap. I judge the font is going for an old-timey typing-in-the-attic-on-the-back-of-scratch-paper aesthetic; not easy to read but something typers over a certain age might feel nostalgic about.
No it does not come down to personal preference, except that the writer's proper preference to produce more readable writing. In fact one thing I particularly dislike about HTML is that it (usually) automatically collapses two spaces to one. And conventions are only good when they are better than the alternatives - two spaces helps set off a sentence, just as capitalization does, and makes text more readable. Web "usability" is also strongly against long blocks of text, which tends to suggest (to me at least) that non-readers (or even anti-readers, witness the popularity of videoblogging and podcasts) have too much influence over web conventions.
It does come down to personal preference in choosing what style to follow. For example, while the CMS says you shouldn't double space, the MLA says it's okay. I was taught to double space in high school, but gave it up afterwards, first because I felt it was unaesthetic, and second because I prefer to follow the CMS in most respects.
It has consequences. Double spaces after periods cause readers to skim. That is good for many types of text, but I doubt most authors want the effect in their fiction.
(and double line-spacing causes readers to read slowly, but not to read well.)
One suspects this is mainly because all extra whitespace is simply ignored in HTML...
So you use - unless your silly little editor won't let you.
is non-breaking. It'll prevent the browser from breaking the line at what ought to be a good place to break it. If you want to force a wider space after a period than the renderer's default, then use  .
Not if you only use it once. The second of the two spaces should be normal. I agree that   is better, however.
About time someone said it
It sounds like one of those small quirks that might or might not have some value, but it's probably too small to bother fighting over it. All geeks have a few of those.
Ah. I'd missed that as well. I automatically include two spaces after a period, but have been trying to stop it. It's not preferred, especially on the web.
Ahhh, alright. That's interesting: I suspect it's an English-language convention, as this is the first time that I hear the term used in such a context. I've never heard anyone even mention the possibility of inserting an extra space after a period, and this includes my Finnish and Swedish teachers back in school.
I believe that is the html character code for a non-breaking-space. It wouldn't be hard replace all occurrences of a period followed by two spaces with ". " before copying and pasting into FictionPress. Of course it's possible that FictionPress renders html character codes literally (as LessWrong apparently does).
Edit: This might also work.