Recently, Microsoft reignited the long standing debate on the proper number of spaces after a period by having Word flag two spaces as an error and offering to fix it. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball is not impressed. He says that the one space versus two spaces argument is a debate only in the sense that “the world is round” or “man landed on the moon” is a debate. One side has all the experts in its camp and the other is wrong.
It’s a long standing holy war that I’ve written about more than once. The TL;DR is that the two spaces rule was taught to those learning to type on a typewriter but that with modern proportional fonts, typographers agree that one space is the only correct answer. It’s mostly a useless argument because almost all software that deals with producing printed output will replace the two spaces with one anyway. Given that fact, a case could be made that using two spaces in the input has the advantages that it may be easier to read and that it makes determining the end of sentences easier for scripts and other software.
Some commentators are suggesting that Microsoft has settled the question once and for all. That’s just silly. Since when has Microsoft been an authority on good style? Indeed, it wasn’t very long ago that Word’s printed output was regularly mocked for its poor typography. If you’re one of those folks who refuses to be pushed around by Microsoft, Lifehacker has a short article that tells you how to turn off Word’s flagging two spaces as an error.