i am a french spacer
Sat on my floor tonight reading old school typography books. they were a bit dusty, but i was looking for something specific. i got frustrated with not finding the sentence i remembered reading sophomore year of college so i opted for the wikipedia route. i’ll find it someday, but this will have to do for now.
With the advent of the computer and the widespread use of proportional fonts, double sentence spacing became obsolete.[9] These proportional fonts now assign appropriate horizontal space to each character (including punctuation marks), and can modify kerning values to adjust spaces following terminal punctuation, so there is less need to manually increase spacing between sentences.[5] From around 1950, single sentence spacing became standard in books, magazines, newspapers, and webpages.[10] This was French spacing—a term synonymous with single sentence spacing until the late twentieth century. However, many still believe that double spaces are correct. The debate continues..
told you so
Concession: http://seanconned.blogspot.com/2010/05/space-wars.html