How come when some people post on forums, they press enter when the text reaches the edge of the editing box? It's actually quite common, for what seems like a behaviour associated with the mechanical typewriter. e.g. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
How come when some people post on forums, they press enter when the text reaches the edge of the editing box? It's actually quite common, for what seems like a behaviour associated with the mechanical typewriter.

e.g.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis
nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu
fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

I don't fear. Was that the question?
Besides, sometimes I fear the opposite: that I accidentally hit the enter, so sometimes I have to delete the space to be sure it's space not enter. Well, that's Obsessive-compulsive disorder... Maybe the the people who "fears" the warp has some similar problems.

Anyway, I haven't seen too much posts like that so far. Which board I should check for them?

Email has often interacted... poorly... with automatic word wrap. Especially with replies. Not all software encourages automatic word wrap use either: for example, I'm not aware of anyone who enables it in their IDEs, thanks to the complexities of good indentation and code layout generally being brutally murdered by automatic newlines.

I'm guessing these habits just carry over.

EDIT: Although, there are also people like me who, having absurd browser width sizes (2048x1152 monitors + small fonts, lawl), will notice that text is absurdly long unless manually formatted, since many formats put no cap on maximum column width. In general, I just make do with properly sized paragraphs making everything effectively double-spaced ;)

I recently took online classes where you had to write a discussion type essay, as well as answering other's essays, and this was so common it drove me insane. To the point that I actually dropped out of the degree plan I was taking. (Online courses are a very horrible, horrible thing.)

This is also quite apparent on these forums as well, and while I understand everyone doesn't know everything -- this IS a technology based software development forum...you'd think, like the OP has stated, that posters would be aware of such features :)

They might be using broken browsers that hard-wrap text entered in textarea input fields. GDNet specifies 'WRAP="virtual"', which might irritate a few browsers, and never really was a good idea.

The other typewriter induced behaviour is in people who hit the space bar twice after full stops. Whitespace collapses to a single space by default on webpages anyway, so why keep doing it? [wink]

Quote: Original post by benryves
The other typewriter induced behaviour is in people who hit the space bar twice after full stops. Whitespace collapses to a single space by default on webpages anyway, so why keep doing it? [wink]

Maybe it is because some people learned to type like that, and the double tap is natural and has no noticeable effect on their typing speeds? If it doesn't actually change anything, and it is the habit of how you type, why put effort into changing the habit?

Quote: Original post by benryves
The other typewriter induced behaviour is in people who hit the space bar twice after full stops. Whitespace collapses to a single space by default on webpages anyway, so why keep doing it? [wink]

As long as they don't use French spacing...

(That's like this , you know…)

Quote: Original post by Talroth

Quote: Original post by benryves
The other typewriter induced behaviour is in people who hit the space bar twice after full stops. Whitespace collapses to a single space by default on webpages anyway, so why keep doing it? [wink]

Maybe it is because some people learned to type like that, and the double tap is natural and has no noticeable effect on their typing speeds? If it doesn't actually change anything, and it is the habit of how you type, why put effort into changing the habit?

Yep, that's me. I've been double-spacing at the end of sentences for 25 years. I doubt I'll ever break the habit.

Some forums actually preserve the spacing by encoding it as "<space>&nbsp;". It's nice until it comes at the end of line and the browser wraps between the space and non-breaking space so the next line has a miniture wtf? indent.

Quote: Original post by benryves
The other typewriter induced behaviour is in people who hit the space bar twice after full stops. Whitespace collapses to a single space by default on webpages anyway, so why keep doing it? [wink]

Because collapsing whitespace to a single space is _wrong_ behavior and we're waiting for the web to catch up to real typography. Publishers expect two spaces after periods, it makes printed text easier to read. They will tell you you're doing it wrong if you send them a manuscript with single spaces between sentences.