[Mediawiki-l] TinyMCE

[Benjamin Horst]

I have to point out that a single space between sentences is not just  
a web-ism, it is in fact the correct way to write in any digital  
medium. This is because of the way letters and spaces are composed  
digitally, versus the older way used by typewriters. Digital letters  
take up whatever width is appropriate based on the actual width of  
each individual glyph, whereas typewriters had a fixed width for all  
glyphs (letters, symbols, digits, etc).

The hack of using two spaces on typewriters was necessary because a  
lot of white space could appear between letters that were narrow, and  
thus even more white space was needed to visually separate sentences.  
The hack was not ever used in other media, such as printing presses or  
in professionally typeset materials, and now that software can  
intelligently manage the width of glyphs, there is no longer any need  
for the double spaces between sentences.

It's been a long time since I used MS Word (OpenOffice displaced it  
for me), but I recall the grammar checker would catch double-spaces  
between sentences and mark it as incorrect. Is this no longer the  
standard behavior?

I was reluctant and annoyed when first told about this--how could my  
high school typing teacher have been wrong? But my company showed me  
some online documentation (which I have since lost track of) assuring  
me that single spaces between sentences is the correct way. And I've  
adjusted and it works great.

-Ben

On Aug 23, 2008, at 1:00 PM, John van V. wrote:

> I considered attempting to install TinyMCE because my use for  
> Mediawiki
> right now is to develop technical documents, and also social science
> arguments about <see sig>
>
> What troubles me about the Mediawiki editor is not the small feature  
> set,
> but the lack of double spaces between sentences.  This "webism"  
> forces me to
> use M$ Word in the library, which scans for this writing error.
>
> I read that there had been problems, so I went to the Moxiecode owned
> Mediawiki, and the Moxie coders have not themselves implemented it  
> there,
> so....
>
> ~~John
> ---
> Empathy
> http://thinman.com/empathy
>
> Photography
> http://thinman.com/photography
>
> Technology
> http://thinman.com
> _______________________________________________
> MediaWiki-l mailing list
> MediaWiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Benjamin Horst
bhorst at mac.com
646-464-2314 (ET)