David Fenton raised the issue of proportional-spaced fonts. The conventional wisdom states that the double-space after a period is needed in a monospace font but is not needed in a proportionally spaced font. Do a Google search for something like "double space period proportional monospace" and you'll find any number of style guides telling you that. Most of them will explain that whereas in a monospace font the extra space is required to better separate sentences, in a proportionally spaced font it's not necessary because the space is automatically built in.
The problem with this explanation is that it is false. The space is *not* automatically built in. Furthermore, in just about any proportionally spaced font, both the space character and the period character are narrower than the average letter, whereas in a monospace font, all are the same size. Therefore, with a monospace font, even when typing only a single space after a period the space between sentences already is greater than it is in a proportionally spaced font. This is largely offset by the fact that words are also more widely spaced, but the wider period still makes a marginal difference.
The notion that proportionally spaced fonts render the extra space unnecessary is a non-sequitur at best, and possibly even backward. Whatever it is that might make an extra space after a period desirable in a monospace font, it is no less desirable in a proportionally spaced font.
So why the change? It's undeniably true that typing habits have changed, and it does seem to correspond to the use of proportionally spaced fonts. What's the correlation?
The answer lies in the arguments for and against. The arguments for the double space all center on readability. Clinical studies back in the 1950s demonstrated that reading comprehension improved when the text included extra space between sentences; the change to proportionally spaced fonts has not changed that. The arguments against the double space overwhelmingly emphasize that it is unattractive. This is true both at the professional level and among amateur partisans. Again, go to the Web and search out all the armchair stylists who insist that double-spacing is wrong. Few if any will tell you that the double-space impairs readability, but virtually all of them will tell you that it's ugly. Likewise, those who study type design seriously will point out the genuine problems the double space creates with justification and creating "rivers" of space through a text block.
In other words, this little debate is just one more battle in the never-ending war between design and content. Double-spacing after a period makes text more readable, but at the same time it makes the page as a whole more ugly -- so decide for yourself which is more important to you. The large-scale trend from monospaced typewriting to proportionally space typography is strongly associated with a move to a greater emphasis on design. There's your correlation.
A few other comments: In any HTML text the debate is moot. Multiple spaces in the HTML source are always treated exactly the same a single space. No browser that I know of adds space after a period in any other way. In Microsoft Word, and perhaps other word processing applications, you can add an "autocorrect" setting which will remove double-spaces as you type.
mdl
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