: Is it good practice to add additional space before a punctuation mark after emphazised text? Is there a typographic convention or practice about placing punctuation marks after emphazised text?

@Pope1402555

IMHO there is one exception when it's acceptable: after a web or mail address. If you cannot avoid having punctuation there, better put a short space there. These addresses often are strange and can end in a dot or a comma; this way you avoid confusion. In a printed text, you should of course use a different font face with different size of dot or comma, which is sufficient. But you cannot do this everywhere. (I prefer good and consistent typography in general, yet I think that one has to remember that typography is here to make documents better, and if it's better for the legibility to add a space there, you add it.)

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@Jessie844

To answer the implied question "Why would a respected source of usability advice do something convention-breaking like that?", the answer is in the source code.

It's not something a human did by adding spaces, it's something their site's CMS does indiscriminately to every inline element on the page (not just links and bolding / italics), because of the way it formats its code.

If you know HTML, this gives it away (if you don't, there's a plain English explanation below):

<h2>
Communicative Content
</h2>
<p>
Text-only ads might have one durable advantage: because they&#39;re a
<a class="old" href="/articles/low-end-media-for-user-empowerment" title="Alertbox April 2003: Low-End Media for User Empowerment">
low-end media format
</a>
, users might take them more seriously. Being forced to express a message in a few words concentrates the advertiser&#39;s mind, and probably leads to more communicative ads that are better
<strong>
focused on explaining how users will benefit
</strong>
from the product or service.
</p>
<p>
&nbsp;
</p>


If you don't know HTML and that means nothing to you:


There aren't actually any spaces after the links or bold or italic/em text. No human hit the space bar or added an extra space after adding a link or bold or italic/em formatting.
Spaces appear because something in their system is formatting the code in a way which puts every HTML element on a separate line - even inline ones like links and <strong> (bold) tags.
HTML parsers like web browsers turn line breaks into spaces.


So, it's their CMS indiscriminately adding spaces to every inline HTML element, not an unconventional editor purposefully targeting links and emphasis.



Also, there are <p>&nbsp;</p> dummy paragraphs. This is a really clumsy way of increasing the spacing between two paragraphs - literally the equivalent of hitting 'Return' twice (and might actually be the result of someone doing just that in a wysiwyg editor). It's unsemantic and offers no control at all on how wide such spaces will be - any attempt to widen or narrow these breaks will widen or narrow every paragraph.

It jumps out as a hallmark of an organisation where there's something of a lack of control of their web publishing, or an organisational disconnect between the needs of the writers and editors, and the features and styles created by the designers and developers.

Normally, you'd expect them to use something like <hr class="wide-break" /> which is semantic, follows web standards as the correct way to "transition to another topic within a section", and allows complete control as to how wide this type of space will be.

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@Speyer780

No, no, no, absolutely not, no, hell to the no, no way, and if I were working on this document in any capacity I would be looking for my Hammer of NO to hit the originator with. Did mention "no"?

There is no reason, rule, suggestion, guide, stricture, or recommendation to put a space before a mark of punctuation. What I see there is someone who either doesn't understand how typesetting works, or someone who coded the HTML by hand and didn't preview to see how it looked.

Your first instinct to "dismiss this as plain wrong" was right on target.

(I am also an editor and proofreader, so this makes me scream from two directions.)

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@Hamm6457569

No, it's not correct to put space before comma or other punctuation marks in English texts:

www.learnenglish.de/grammar/punctuationtext.htm http://everything2.com/title/rules+of+typography www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/08/15/mind-your-en-and-em-dashes-typographic-etiquette/ http://en.kioskea.net/faq/4413-some-typographical-rules#comma www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/bien-well/fra-eng/typographie-typography/espacement-spacing101-eng.html

So what you see on that website is incorrect. As far as I'm aware though sometimes in other languages (French???) it is allowed to put a short space before comma. But I don't know what's the rule behind it. I'm sure it's not correct in English though.

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