Empty space in statistic of forum

[jsx]

Hi, in this topic: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=502533.0 I wrote question in relation to space in statistics of the forum (bottom part of forum), I would like to report this case here and I ask for eliminate this space, that there wasn't a empty space in parentheses. Please consider this minor mistake during the next update of the forum.

Example:

Latest Post: "Re: Stop Forum Spam" ( Today at 01:48:27 PM )

Should be:

Latest Post: "Re: Stop Forum Spam" (Today at 01:48:27 PM) <----

Thanks.

[Arantor]

Why must it be a mistake? All evidence suggests it is entirely intentional. It's just that you don't like it, which isn't the same thing.

[Kindred]

I think it is a matter of personal preference on the part of the themers...   

So, I'm not sure if it should be considered a "bug" or a "theme specific design item"


but the user did report it here for discussion on whether it is a bug or not at my prompting.

[Arantor]

It was changed in 1.1 (1.0 did not have this space, just checked), back in 2005-6 and was done as far as I can tell because of complaints that it wasn't as readable without the space.

This seems to be by design on the basis of all available evidence - and to me that's just not a bug.

[jsx]

It just my opinion, I thought that I would ask on the forum what with it is about and I will give the suggestion whether it can be corrected, because everywhere a text is applied in the parentheses in the form (Lorem Ipsum...) rather than ( Lorem Ipsum... ). If you don't want to fix this and think, that should be in this way so ok, it's all from me.

[Arantor]

You saying 'fix it' implies that it is broken in the first place

[NanoSector]

Locked; duplicate, and not a bug.

[Kindred]

unlocked.

user posted here by jnstruction and although this is not specifically a bug, it is open for discussion as a personal preference.

[Matthew K.]

Well, as it's already been said, it's not a bug. Furthermore, as Arantor has said, it was done that way for readability, and I would agree with leaving it how it is. If you want it changed, you can do it on your own forum, but I don't intend on changing this in SMF 2.1.

[emanuele]

Well, TBH I don't see such a big difference readability-wise.
It is the same "issue" you have in any other case where you have something in parenthesis, like "xxx guests, yyy users (zz hiddens)", this doesn't have spaces before and after and is readable.

I would be consistent and remove the spaces, or add them everywhere (it sounds a bit odd that is difficult to read somewhere and not 2 lines below...or 10: "Most Online Today: 1,574. Most Online Ever: 3,726 (January 19, 2008, 04:00:17 AM)".

[Arantor]

The thing is, there's always going to be some of these which start with 'Today' or 'Yesterday', in bold, straight after the brackets - and that's when it gets less readable.

[emanuele]

Since I'm not interested in the chatting about what is right and what I'm quoting it here.

It's still a preference until you can explain *why* it's a problem. Disliking the way something looks is not a problem, it is working as designed and it was changed for a *reason* in the first place, namely that in some fonts and some circumstances the parentheses were too close to the letters. And in some languages it is correct that there is a space, in fact (notably French), between text and punctuation, even down to tailing exclamation marks.

I didn't know about that French rules, so I searched a bit (firsts results on startpages, so not a "deep" search ):
http://unicode.org/udhr/n/notes_fra.html
http://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/bien-well/fra-eng/typographie-typography/ponctesp-poncspac-fra.html
http://typophile.com/node/94726 (that links: http://www.tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-dist/doc/generic/babel/babel.pdf ).
So, apparently the space in French (non-breakable space BTW) is needed before : ! ; and ?, so called double-punctuation.
Fine, we should rewrite several pieces to be in line with that... meh, it's French I don't care. (Joking )

Apparently British English is (or was) using the same set of rules as French (or Fr was using the same as BE, not relevant here ).

In both cases, it's just about the 4 punctuation marks listed above, so not relevant in our case.

Searching a bit about parenthesis I did find anything explicit.
From the "English Style Guide - A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission", I found:

punctuation marks in English are always - apart from dashes (see 3.17) and ellipsis points (see 3.3) - closed up to the preceding word;

but this cannot be considered a good styling guide for British English I think, more for "European English"...

Either way, it's just a problem of typesetting, not of correct grammar (or whatever it's called ), so well, don't really care that much even though I like consistency and if it is a readability issue there, then it should be in the other places too (TBH, in 2.1 I'd say that the bold helps in distinguish the parenthesis, while the other two instances of similar text I mentioned without a bold part are more difficult to read).

ETA: and it should be a nbsp.

[Arantor]

Consistency is good. I changed this to remove the save - as pointed out, the bold does help distinguish it because the bold is a slightly different colour...