Why the WGA should be crushed and ground into dust

Wherein freakin' typewriter-vexed luddites


Reading Kottke.org I came across this horrifying news:

This comes from a blog called Why We Write, a collection of essays by TV and film writers who are currently out of work due to the Writer's Guild strike. My favorite part of the site is the placement of two spaces after a period instead of the HTML default of one. View the source to check out the crazy markup they use to accomplish that little bit of fussiness.

Two spaces after a period? No fucking way. Let's take a look. Ohmygod, they are. I thought only weird-ass lawyers stuck in the 1950s were afflicted with this inability to adapt beyond the sixth grade:

• Throwing Thingy people: Two spaces after a period. That's the rule and I will think less of you if you disagree.
  
• Another annoying lawyer discussion.

To repeat myself, two spaces after a period is an artifact from the monospace typewriter days. It seems like a lot of scripts are written in courier, so two spaces would be appropriate. Actually, 12-point courier:

One is nostalgic (Courier font resembles the look of a page written on a mechanical typewriter), but the other reason is highly practical: Courier is a monospaced font meaning every glyph is the same width (as opposed to variable-width fonts, where the "w" and "m" are wider than most letters, and the "i" is narrower). With a monospaced font only a certain amount of letters will fit on each row and each page, assuring uniformity of the format and achieving the one page per minute of screen time formula.

Nostalgia? Fuck that shit. Go stage a revival of Fiddler on the Roof if that's your malfunction. Anyway, your webpage isn't in courier, so the two spaces just looks wrong. Until you "writers" fix this unforgiveable error, I'm hoping the producers make soup with the bones of your children.

Read:

• Why you should use one space after each sentence
  
• One Versus Two Spaces After a Period
  
• Chicago Manual of Style
  
• More CMOS