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A discussion about punctuation caught my eye.
I'd love to hear others' thoughts and usages surrounding two spaces -- I love those weird little side-effects of language and how it . (Another would be using '--' instead of —, or " for both ends of a quote -- though of course, other languages have more differentiable quote markers, which is a whole other discussion.)
acdw: Spaces after a period (yes, it's *that* discussion)
A long time ago I hated smart quotes. I didn’t know what character encodings were. All I knew was that curly quotes from Microsoft Word showed up as empty boxes in other apps. My allowance could never afford Microsoft Office on my hand-me-down PC and I resented the assumption that everyone on the web used Office and Outlook.
Times change. My opinion has changed too. Unicode is universal. Smart quotes and even radically different “text” like emojis are usable on free and open source software. The assumption that the majority uses Microsoft still exists, but it’s lessened.
Up with smart quotes, I say. Not only do they look nicer, but they convey more meaning than straight quotes. As academics say, they are more semantic. If I wanted to search for the beginning of a quote, I can look for a left double quote. With straight quotes you get 100% more hits in your search results but they are false positives. If you disagree with me, then it’s straightforward for you to convert curly quotes to straight quotes, but the reverse is difficult.
Thinking back to my gripes with Outlook I found this blog post from jwz.
(WWW) JWZ: HTML email: was that your fault?
The comments mention that ClariNet, an old Usenet service, had a special way of encoding HTML news pages that gracefully degraded to plain text on other news reader client apps. They called this system ProleText (as a joke on “proletariat” versus “rich text”).
(WWW) ProleText format details
The gist of the ProleText system is that it encodes formatting in whitespace. Plain text files, no more than 60 characters per line, use sequences of tabs and spaces at the end of those lines to convey information. A ClariNet subscriber using a plain text newsreader sees plain text news, with lines maybe a little shorter than they needed to be. A ClariNet subscriber using a ClariNet client sees a fancy page with joined lines, headers, and links. All that fanciness was invisibly embedded in the plain text news.
The motivation is somewhat reminiscent of the problem that led to the creation of text/gemini. Suppose Gemini never existed and ProleText was used. It’s not a stretch to imagine phlogs showing plain text to most Gopher clients but rich text to new clients.
Nevertheless, my reaction to ProleText was “Thanks, I hate it!” It reminds me of the Whitespace programming language. It’s a clever hack, but it’s gross. As Alex Martelli wrote in the Python Cookbook, “To describe something as 'clever' is _not_ considered a compliment”.
Whitespace language on Wikipedia
I like the fancy text of Gemini. It, too, degrades gracefully to plain text (with a caveat here and there). Gemini feels more straightforward to me. I don’t have a rubric or litmus test to determine what is sensible or not, but I like Gemini. It’s opinionated software, and even though I don’t agree with every aspect of it, I like it.
9 September 2020 by Sardonyx
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