How about this
One flew over the cuckoos nest should be on the top of everyone's list
of kid's books.<br /> In fact, it is
even more important than Joe Joe the Big ol' cornflake. <br />
style sheet
br {display:inline; width:2em;}
I don't even know what this would work like, just throwing it out. It
would be easier to code and degrade better.
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Novitski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 3:48 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [WSG] double space after period
At 01:33 PM 2/9/2005, Lachlan Hardy wrote:
>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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