From: "Frank da Cruz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > In the world of plain text, two spaces after a sentence-ending period, > exclamation mark, question mark, or other mark is actually rather handy to > distinguish sentence enders from the same marks used in other ways, > esp. periods in abbreviations. This allows a text editor to have sentence > oriented commands that work simply and predictably, as opposed to (say) > "autorecognizing" your language, grammer, and style.
A French typist would hate to have to enter two spaces after each sentence in a paragraph with such an editor. This is almost never entered like this, and I am not used to this "English convention" (even in this message...) which also is ignored in HTML processing where the number of spaces don't matter, and in most SGML and XML documents (including XHTML) where the behavior of spaces is mandatory if used with a correctly labelled DTD or XSD (XML-Schema). On the opposite, the behavior of narrow or normal non-breaking spaces is clear: fixed-width for word-justification of lines, unbreakable before and after them. Unicode already defines with character properties those punctuations that terminate sentences. Why would you need to recognize sequences of two spaces as meaning an end of sentence??? This would be wrong to select sentenced in a preformated plain-text, even in English...
