Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evolving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Rules For the rest of the Site also accessible on the sidebar.
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Did you know: years ago MLA standard, and most the rest of everyone, demanded 2 spaces after every sentence typed out. With the advent of typerwriters in the late 1800s, the practice became the gold standard for legebility of the printed form. Readability was king and life was good.
Then came the Internet. As early as 1996, MLA and APA started waffling, switching recommendations between 1 and 2 spaces between sentences. By ,~2000, MLA had pretty well stabilized on 1 space. By 2017, APA followed suit. Why did this happen? Some people will say it has flip-flopped for decades (true), newspapers over the years wanted to save space, some will say woke-ism is to blame (also probably true), and some will say TDS finally hit the last nail in the coffin. But if you are in IT, you know the real truth:
HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
HTML allows you to format your source documents by laying out your documents however you want. Add tabs, spaces, hard returns, whatever it takes to make it legible and understandable. The only tradeoff is, by design HTML ignores anything more than 1 space. If it encounters more than one space, it truncates it down to just one. Every time.
At first scholars tried to work around this by adding code, " ", which would add an extra space. After every single sentence. This was recognized as such a pain in the butt and they finally gave up and instead changed the standard, which is why it is now proper form to space only 1x after a sentence. 😒