Techie question about line breaks and quotation marks

About This Message Board
1

This question is not specifically about Straight Dope. It happens elsewhere too, but because it does happen here, I figured this might be a good place to ask.

There are lots of places on the web where you can type several paragraphs worth of stuff. This box on SD is one. Writing an email is another. Comments to a blog likewise. The normal convention is that you start typing, and just keep on going, and don’t worry about what happens when you get close to the wall at the right-hand side of the box. When you reach it, one of several things will happen: If the last thing that could fit on the line is a blank space, then your typing will simply continue on the next line. If the last thing to fit was the final letter of a word, or the ending punctuation of a sentence, then the blank which follows will be invisible, and again, you’ll simply continue on the next line. The really cool case (or, at least, really cool to old fogies like me who grew up with manual typewriters) is when you get to the right-hand margin before you’ve finished a word; in such a case, the computer will take the part of the word you’ve already started, and move it to the next line, so that when you keep typing, the word will not be broken into two parts.

All the above should be pretty old-hat to anyone who has written more than a few emails of postings. But it is not entirely accurate. There are exceptions to those rules, and they drive me nuts. These exceptions would not bother me so much if I knew the logic behind them, and I’m hoping someone can help me out.

Specifically, I want to know about the following case: You are close to the end of a line, and the next word is a long one, which you know will end up on the next line. But that word is preceded by a quotation mark, with no blank space betwen them. Guess what happens? Not only does the quotation mark and adjacent word get pushed to the next line (exactly like you’d expect), but the word before it gets moved to the next line also.

I don’t understand why this happens. It is as if an ordinary blank space is considered to be a “nonbreaking blank space” when a quotation mark follows it. (Please note that if a quotation mark comes before a blank space, that blank is a regular breaking blank space, and the quotation mark will remain on the first line.)

Anyone know why this behavior occurs?

2

You mean in the text entry box, right, not after it’s posted? I just tried to replicate this (in Mozilla on a Mac), and was unable to. A space followed by a quotation mark behaved just like any other space. What program and operating system are you using?

3

Correct. Sorry for the confusion. I’m using Internet Explorer 6. This also happens when I write email in Juno On The Web, with IE6. I see that it does not happen when writing a new email with Outlook Express 6.

Sounds like it might be an IE thing, as the other occurences IIRC were also web-based text entry boxes. That’s a decent clue. Thanks. I’ll look in the IE Options.

4

I just tried it with IE 7 and, son of a gun, it happens there, too. What an odd little bug.

5

Firefox doesn’t do it (and I just checked IE6 on the same machine and it does do it).

I think it might even be intentional to assist comprehension, consider (NB: artificial illustrative line breaks in these examples):

It has been labelled a bug in Internet Explorer, but as Shakespeare said:
‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.’

vs:

It has been labelled a bug in Internet Explorer, but as Shakespeare
said: ‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.’

Or it might be to avoid some obscure pitfall that arises in some applications (that use the same controls, or their ancestors) when you begin a line with a quotation mark. Either way, it seems too specific to be unintentional.

6

Thanks for the ideas. Anyone think this thread might be better off in GQ?

(Note to all: This thread was originally placed in About This Message Board.)

7

My guess would be something like this. Carriage returns, spaces, and quotation marks are all things which can have special meaning in computer systems. Often, the quotation mark’s special meaning involves surpressing the special meanings of other characters. So a space might be interpreted as “the special character which means it’s OK to break the line here”, but a space next to a quotation mark might not get that special interpretation.