I’m having an interesting discussion with a friend who handles usability for websites. It’s all around the ongoing and sometimes heated debate over 1 space or 2 after a period when writing. Now, let’s get a little history on this. Years ago with type-writers, people put 2 spaces after a period to help emphasis that there was a space there. It’s considered to be just a bit easier on the eyes. But not everyone used 2 spaces. Newspapers used 1 space simply to conserve space on the page so they could fit in more words. After all, people read the stories for the words, not the blank spaces between sentences. Most of the publishing industry drifted to 1 space for the same reason – it saves space and therefore paper.
These days most people consider just using a single space after a period to be perfectly acceptable. I still find hold outs who want two spaces, and I’ve work for companies that insisted on two spaces in business letters even if all their publications went out with one space.
Of course, if you write on the web, you’ll find that often your only choice is one space after a period unless you want to go in and manually add non-breaking spaces into the html. In many cases, content management programs for publishing to the web are designed to resolve the double space into a single space. I know because I used to end up having this discussing with the big company I worked for where one group had made up its mind that there should be 2 spaces even though our content management system automatically removed the extra space. The battle over that extra space gets so heated that they just wouldn’t accept – it is not technically possible for people to do what you are asking unless you’d like to pay to replace the content management system.
One space for the win.