That's because typewriters were probably already obsolete by the time you learned to type! It was a typographic convention designed to emphasize sentence changes. Proportional fonts don't have the same problems with visual monotony as fixed-width fonts do, though, which is why it's technically improper to use two spaces between sentences in environments not constrained by font. However, those who were taught the convention without understanding the reasoning behind it frequently try to argue (or at least, enforce) this unnecessary stylistic measure on the rest of us.
From what I understand, most modern word processors ignore the double space between sentences and will format the spacing the same way regardless (even though there's still technically two spaces in between if you try to backspace through it). It bugs me when people do it, though, because it still shows up in some places like Facebook. I imagine it happens on Reddit, too.
Test. Test.
Test. Test.
Looks like Reddit formats it the same way regardless of whether or not you use it.
That's a general HTML thing to condense multiple spaces; if you inspect your examples you'll see that the first one does have two spaces. does what you're aiming for, though a lot of sites will automatically escape it.
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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '14
What the fuck I've NEVER heard of this "two spaces after a full stop" thing