Props to Bob. That's Kinda what I was afraid of... no good way of achieving the desired effect without creating a bunch of extraneous markup.
Any idea how common (serious of an issue) Meares-Irlen Syndrome really is? Apparently, you can alleviate that problem with a little color in the background. It seems that there are at least 2 people in an office of 12 that have "old-schooler typewriter double-space syndrome". One of them is under 30, so there must be colleges and universities that still enforce the double-space in their writing style guides. This ought to be more of a user preference than a set-in-stone typographic commandment. There must be a way to make the double-space people happy. It's definitely easy enough to create a background color user style sheet for the Meares-Irlen people. I would never really use double-space presentation on a public website, but am certainly interested in the ability to modify a page on the client (web browser, email client, IM chat windows - which I happen to work on) in this manner - literally to the point of animating the space getting bigger on the press of a key. This is why we separate presentation from content right? So that the user agent has the flexibility of form while content remains semantically intact and machine parse-able...? Without knowing the bureaucracy and process of the W3C, I would say that this is at least worth consideration in CSS3, along with the proposed punctuation-trim... perhaps "punctuation-padding" or "sentence-spacing"... Now that I think about it, it would also be nice to highlight every other sentence so I could quickly see if there are any run-ons in an article. That level of separation would be great - perhaps clicking to collapse spans of text (without <span>!), one sentence at a time. Of course, I could write my own pre-parser to <span> wrap every sentence in a <p>, but what is the point? Should I move this discussion somewhere more appropriate? ~jose Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 06:43:47 -0400 From: Bob Easton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: CSS List <css-d@lists.css-discuss.org> Subject: Re: [css-d] sentence-spacing? Bob Easton Wrote: >Jose Miguel Hernandez wrote: >> I was wondering if anyone knows of an appropriate way to increase or >> decrease sentence-spacing - for which there is no property I can find >> in the CSS2 spec. By this, I mean to simulate the effect of >> double-spacing after a period, which some people in my company insist >> on doing - even after reading the following informative article: >> >> Singlespace vs. Double Space >> http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html >> >First, the technical answer... >There is nothing in HTML or CSS that recognizes a sentence as a basic >unit. Blocks, yes. Paragraphs, yes. Sentences, no. Without that >basic level of parsing, the answer is going to be very difficult to >implement. One -could- use the content: attribute to add an extra >space, like this. (untested) >.sentence { > content: " "; > display: inline; } > >Of course, this would mean wrapping every sentence in a <div> just to >get the class attached. >ref: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#propdef-content > >Then, an accessibility concern... >Those "rivers of white" represent a significant cognitive understanding >problem for people with Meares-Irlen Syndrome (scotopic sensitivity). >Stick with one space after a period. >-- >Bob Easton >Accessibility Matters: http://access-matters.com ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
