Something which no one has mentioned is the possible accessibility benefits of the extra spacing following the period. My thoughts are that the extra spacing will more easily distinguish the sentence for all, but particularly those with cognitive disabilities
Lachlan,
One argument for NOT separating sentences not mentioned by any of our esteemed colleagues thus far is that it would remove the delightful ambiguity from such commonplace prose as:
D. Hodges gave her address
as 123 Willow Ln. N. Henderson
recoiled in shock.It would be a drab, gray world if we always knew for sure where the next sentence began.
To play devil's advocate, extra horizontal space between sentences is only one way in which one could style prose to be easier to read; I think you're mentioning double-spacing only because it happens to have been used in the past, in dem olden days when keyboards still delivered a punch. I imagine you could come up with a variety of ways to clarify the separation of sentences and other structures in blocks of prose -- you could insert a graphic symbol between sentences more unique and obvious than the dot on the baseline that we use now, separate sentences with line breaks & white space similar to paragraphing, change color or other font attributes from one sentence to the next, highlight various parts of speech, etc.
Before I get grumped upon let me say that I'm not recommending that anyone actually do this, I'm merely addressing the question of how.
Whatever cosmetic solutions you chose to use, you could put hooks into your markup to make them possible. For example you could mark up the spaces between sentences:
<p>The mouse ran over the cat.<span class="gap"> </span>Having fled the scene, the mouse was later charged with hit and run and scampering under the influence of Brie.</p>
...or you could mark the sentences themselves:
<p><span class="sentence">The mouse ran over the cat.</span> <span class="sentence">Having fled the scene, the mouse was later charged with hit and run and scampering under the influence of Brie.</span></p>
The two approaches suggest different sets of styling possibilities. Either one would make for fat markup, but at least you could style it differently (including not at all) for different audiences.
Getting back to the specific question of double-spacing, it seems to me that the best way to do this (were one ever to be so silly!) would be to increase word-spacing for the inter-sentence spaces:
<p>Rah rah rah.<span class="gap"> </span>Sis boom bah.</p>
span.gap {word-spacing: 1em;}Without taking the time to test this, my guess is that it would not interfere with line-wrap in the user agent, even in justified text. Other approaches that come to mind, e.g. adding extra right-padding to the end of each sentence, would undoubtedly cause layout problems.
Paul
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