Spaced Out

I found a Slate article mentioned by robhague today on Twitter rather reassuring. Although I don't really share the author's anger over the habit of many people of putting two spaces are a full stop it's good to know that I'm not alone in seeing a lot of this.

The place where I see a lot of it is when members of Cavernoma Alliance UK send us their story to post of the (private and secure) members' web site. The demographic, given the condition and the age at which we're typically diagnosed, is 40+ which may explain why so many of us do it: we learned to type in the days of typewriters and the very earliest fixed pitch font word processors like Wordstar. In those days we were all taught to double space after a full stop at the end of a sentence.

But now of course the word processing software takes care of this for us, so there's no need for this primitive manual spacing. People still do it though.

The odd thing is that I studiously delete the extra spaces: which is odd really given that with HTML there's no need to do that as, unlike in word processing software, all whitespace is treated as a single space.

So what does that make me?