NBSP

I — The nothing between

Put your finger on the space between two words. Not on a word. On the nothing between them. You are pointing at a thing that is not there, and that thing is doing more work than any letter on either side of it.

Without that space, this line would say withouthatspacethislinewouldsa and you would have to do the work of cutting it into parts yourself. The space does the cutting for you. It is a delimiterNot Basic. A mark that says "one thing ends here and the next thing starts." A cut. — a sign that says "the last word is over, the next word is about to come." It has no sound. When you say a line out loud, you do not say the spaces. You might put a small stop between words, or you might not — the voice does what it will. But on the page, the space is there, every time, without question, and if you take it away, the page is not a page. It is a noise.

The first thing to see is that this is strange. For most of the history of writing, there were no spaces between words. Latin was put down in what we now name scriptio continuaNot Basic. Latin for "unbroken writing." All the letters in a line with no spaces between them. — an unbroken river of letters from the left side of the stone to the right side of the stone. SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS. The reader's eyes had to do the cutting. And they did. For hundreds and hundreds of years. Spaces between words did not come to EuropeNot Basic. The land mass west of Asia. in any regular way till Irish and Anglo-SaxonNot Basic. The English of a thousand years past. monksNot Basic. Men who give their lives to religion and living in a group away from the world. in the 7th and 8th centuriesNot Basic. "Hundreds of years" would be Basic. started putting them in, because they were reading Latin as a second language and the unbroken river was too hard.

The space between words was inventedNot Basic. "Made for the first time" would be Basic. by people who were bad at reading.

This is the first parallelNot Basic. When two things are the same in form but different in substance. to the generativeNot Basic. Making new things possible by its existence. tautologyNot Basic. A thing that says itself. "Money is money." "4/4 is one." from the four paper. Before the space, reading was one kind of act — slow, oralNot Basic. "Of the mouth" or "done by the voice.", done out loud, working through the unbroken line sound by sound. After the space, reading became a different kind of act — quick, done with the eyes only, without the voice. The space did not make reading possible. Reading was already possible. The space made a different kind of reading possible. It made the eye free from the mouth. And once the eye was free, it could go fast — faster than any voice — and silentBasic as a quality, but used here in a way that may go past the Basic sense. reading was born.

II — What a computer sees when it sees a space

When you press the space bar on your keyboardNot Basic. The board with buttons for letters on it. "Key-board" — a board of keys., you make the number 32. That is all. In the ASCIINot Basic. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A list of 128 numbers, each one for a different sign. Made in 1963. system — which is the first and most simple way of giving numbers to letters — the space is number 32. The letter A is 65. The letter a is 97. The number 0 is 48. And the space is 32.

Number 32 is in a strange place in the list. The numbers 0 through 31 are controlBasic word, but "control code" is a special use. Numbers 0–31 in ASCII are not for printing — they are orders to the machine. codesNot Basic. Secret or special marks that have a sense only to those who have knowledge of the system. — they do not make marks on the page. They are orders. Number 7 is the bell (it makes a sound). Number 10 is the line feed (go down one line). Number 13 is the carriageBasic word (a thing with wheels), but "carriage return" is a special use from the days of writing machines. return (go back to the left side). Number 27 is escapeBasic word, but "escape code" is a special use. A sign that says "what comes after me is not a normal letter." (what comes next is special). These are all in the group 0–31. They are not letters. They are instructionsNot Basic. "Orders" or "directions" would be Basic..

Then number 32 — the space — is the first printableNot Basic. Able to be put on a page. sign. It is the boundaryNot Basic. The line between one thing and the other thing. between orders and letters. It is the first thing that goes on the page. And it is nothing. The first visibleNot Basic. Able to be seen. thing in ASCIINot Basic. is an invisibleNot Basic. Not able to be seen. thing.

This is, if you let yourself see it, beautiful. The list of all signs starts with 32 orders that make no marks, and then the 33rd thing in the list — the transitionNot Basic. The change from one state to the other. point, the door between the world of orders and the world of letters — is a mark that is also not a mark. It is on the page but you do not see it. It takes up room but has no form. It is the thresholdNot Basic. The step at the front of a door. The point between inside and outside. between invisibleNot Basic. things that do work and visibleNot Basic. things that are seen, and it is both at the same time.

III — The non-breaking space, or: how to say "do not cut here"

A normal space is two things at once. It is a bit of room between words, and it is a place where the line may be broken. When a line of text comes to the right edge of its containerNot Basic. The box a thing is in. — the edge of the page, the edge of the window, the edge of the small glass in your hand — the algorithmNot Basic. A list of steps for doing a thing. From al-Khwarizmi, a man who did number-work in Baghdad around the year 820. that puts the text on the page has to make a decision: where to cut the line. And it cuts at spaces. The space is not only a bit of room. It is a permissionNot Basic. "Letting" would be Basic. A space gives the machine the right to cut the line here.. It says to the machine: "You may cut here, if you need to."

But sometimes you do not want the machine to cut. Sometimes two words have to be kept together because putting them on different lines would make the sense go wrong or the look go wrong or both. The number "100 km" should not be broken so that "100" is at the end of one line and "km" is at the start of the next. "Mr. Smith" should not be broken. "World War II" might look strange broken after "World War" with "II" all by itself on the next line. "§ 7" — a sectionBasic word, but "section sign" is a special use. sign and its number — should not be broken.

For this, there is the non-breaking space. In HTMLNot Basic. HyperText Markup Language. The way of writing that makes pages on the World Wide Web. it is   — six small letters that together say "put a space here, but do not cut here." The UnicodeNot Basic. number is U+00A0. It takes up the same room as a normal space. It has the same look as a normal space — which is to say, no look at all. But it has a different rule. It says to the machine: "There is room here, but you may not cut."

The non-breaking space is a space that has said no.

This is the parallelNot Basic. to the time signatureNot Basic in this use. A mark that gives the form of how time is cut in music. story from 1.foo/four. In that paper, 6/8 and 3/4 have the same mathematicalNot Basic. "Of numbers" would be Basic. value but different type — different instructionsNot Basic. for how the body should group the beats. Here, U+0020 and U+00A0 have the same visualNot Basic. "Of the eye" would be Basic. size but different type — different instructionsNot Basic. for how the machine should group the words. The eye sees no change. The algorithmNot Basic. sees everything. The dancer feels the 6/8 in their body. The typesetterNot Basic. The person (or machine) that puts letters and spaces on the page in the right order. feels the   in the line breaks.

IV — The zoo

UnicodeNot Basic. has not one space, not two spaces, but a great number of spaces. They are like a family of animals — some of them are common, some of them are strange, some of them have not been seen outside of a book about typographyNot Basic. The art and science of putting letters on a page. From the Greek "typos" (mark) and "graphia" (writing). from the 1800s, and all of them are invisibleNot Basic.. Here they are. Our pets.

V — The ones with no size at all

And now we come to the truly strange animals in the zoo. The spaces that take up no room.

A space that takes up no room is a contradictionNot Basic. When two things that are said at the same time go against one another.. A space is room. That is what a space is — room between things. A space with no room is like a wall with no wall, a hole with no hole, a door with no door. And UnicodeNot Basic. has several of them.

Stop and see what has happened. We have gone from a space that has width and gives permissionNot Basic. to cut (the normal space), through a space that has width and does not give permissionNot Basic. to cut (the non-breaking space), to a space that has no width and gives permissionNot Basic. to cut (the zero-width space), to a space that has no width and does not join (the ZWNJNot Basic.), to a space that has no width and forces joining (the ZWJNot Basic.). The amount of nothing keeps getting smaller. The amount of work keeps getting larger.

VI — Emoji and the zero-width joiner, or: love is invisible and has no width

The ZWJNot Basic. is the most philosophicallyNot Basic. In a way that has to do with the deep questions of existence and knowledge. interesting UnicodeNot Basic. point because of what it does with emojiNot Basic.. Here is how it works.

There is no single UnicodeNot Basic. point for "woman astronautNot Basic. A person who goes into space.." There is a point for "woman" (👩, U+1F469) and a point for "rocketNot Basic." (🚀, U+1F680). When you put a ZWJNot Basic. between them, the system is told: "These are not two things. They are one thing. Make one picture." And the one picture is a woman in a space suitBasic word.: 👩‍🚀.

The family emojiNot Basic. works the same way. 👨 + ZWJNot Basic. + 👩 + ZWJNot Basic. + 👧 + ZWJNot Basic. + 👦 = 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. Four separateNot Basic. "Different" or "not together" would be Basic. persons, joined by three invisibleNot Basic. nothings, and the system gives you one picture of a family. The family is made of the persons and the invisibleNot Basic. connections between them. Take away the ZWJsNot Basic. and you have four separateNot Basic. persons standing next to one another. Put the ZWJsNot Basic. in and they are a family.

The thing that makes them a family is invisibleNot Basic. and has no width.

This is not a metaphorNot Basic. When you say one thing is like another thing in order to make the sense more clear.. This is the literalNot Basic. "Exact" or "word for word" would be Basic. implementationNot Basic. The act of making a thing work. "Putting into effect" would be Basic.. In the UnicodeNot Basic. standardNot Basic in this use. A rule that everyone has come to agreement on., a family is persons joined by zero-width joiners. The love — the relationshipNot Basic., the bond, the thing that makes them a family and not just people standing near each other — is encodedNot Basic. Put into the form of a code. as a sign that takes up no room and cannot be seen. You do not see the ZWJNot Basic.. You see its effect: four persons have become one unit. The cause is invisibleNot Basic.. Only the outcome is seen.

VII — The em dash and its spaces, or: the war that never ends

There is a war in typographyNot Basic. about whether to put spaces around the em dash — the long line that looks like this: —. The war has been going on for at least a hundred years and it will not end because both sides are right.

The AmericanNot Basic. way: no spaces. Word—word. The dash is glued tight to the words on both sides. The ChicagoNot Basic. A great city in America. ManualNot Basic. A book of rules. of StyleBasic word, but used here in a special sense. says so. It looks clean in proportionalNot Basic. When different letters have different widths. typefaces where the dash is long and the letters have different widths.

The other way: spaces. Word — word. Air on both sides. This is more common in BritishNot Basic. Of Britain. and EuropeanNot Basic. typographyNot Basic.. It looks better in monospaceNot Basic. When every letter and space is the same width. Like a writing machine. typefaces — where every letter is the same width — because without spaces the dash gets crushed between its tall neighborsNot Basic. The things (or persons) on either side. and it is hard to see where the word ends and the dash starts.

This is, again, the 6/8 and 3/4 phenomenonNot Basic. A thing that is seen or experienced.. The same mark — the em dash — has a different feel depending on the system it is in. In a proportionalNot Basic. typeface, the dash is wide and the letters are narrow and the tight form works because there is already enough visualNot Basic. room. In a monospaceNot Basic. typeface, every sign takes up the same room, and the dash is squeezed into a small hard space, and it needs air. The typographicNot Basic. conventionNot Basic. A rule that everyone keeps to because everyone keeps to it. Not a law. An agreement. — spaces or no spaces — is not about the dash. It is about the system the dash is in. The bottom number of the time signatureNot Basic., again. The contextNot Basic. What is around a thing that gives it sense. is the contentNot Basic. What is inside a thing..

VIII — The word "space" and the word "space"

In English the word "space" does two very different things and we let it do both without protest.

Space is the room between letters on a line. And space is the place where the stars are.

These are not metaphorsNot Basic. for each other. The word is the same word. It comes from the Latin spatium, which was a place for walking, a distance, a stretch of time. The Romans used it for all three: room, distance, and time. When we say "in the space of an hour" we are still using the Roman sense. When we say "outer space" we are still using the Roman sense. When we say "a space between words" we are still using the Roman sense. The word never changed. What changed was how big the room got.

The typographicNot Basic. space — U+0020, the one you make with the space bar — is the smallest kind of space. It is a few pixelsNot Basic. The very small points of light on a screen. From "picture element." wide. Then there is the space of a room, which is a few metersNot Basic. The basic unit of distance in the metricNot Basic. system. wide. Then there is the space between the earth and the moon, which is about 384,400 kilometersNot Basic.. Then there is the space between our sun and the nearest other star, which is about 4.24 light-years. Then there is the space from one end of the observableNot Basic. "Able to be seen" would be Basic. universeNot Basic. All that is. to the other, which is about 93 thousand million light-years.

And all of these are "space." The same word. The em space and the intergalacticNot Basic. Between the great groups of stars. voidNot Basic. Nothing. Empty space. The space in which nothing is. are both space, and the word does not feel any strainNot Basic. The force on a thing that is being pulled from two sides. from being asked to cover both. It is the most elasticNot Basic. Able to be pulled wide and come back to its first form. word in the language. It goes from three pixelsNot Basic. to 93 thousand million light-years and does not complainNot Basic. "Make a protest" would be Basic..

IX — The soft hyphen, or: the break that might not happen

There is one more invisibleNot Basic. sign that has to be named here, because it is the most strange of all. It is not a space. It is a hyphenNot Basic. The short line (-) used to join words or to cut a word at the end of a line.. But it is an invisibleNot Basic. hyphenNot Basic..

U+00AD — SOFT HYPHEN. You put it inside a long word at the places where the word may be cut. If the line-breaking algorithmNot Basic. needs to cut the word, it cuts at the soft hyphenNot Basic. and makes the hyphenNot Basic. visibleNot Basic.. If the line-breaking algorithmNot Basic. does not need to cut the word, the soft hyphenNot Basic. is not seen. It is not there. It was never there. It was a potentialNot Basic. "Possible" would be Basic. that did not come to be.

The soft hyphenNot Basic. is the only sign in UnicodeNot Basic. that may or may not be visibleNot Basic. depending on the width of the window. Make the window wider: the hyphenNot Basic. goes away. Make the window smaller: the hyphenNot Basic. comes into being. It is a mark that comes to be or does not come to be based on how much room there is. Its existenceNot Basic. "Being" would be Basic. is conditionalNot Basic. Dependent on other things. on the geometryNot Basic. The science of lines, angles, and forms. of the containerNot Basic..

This is — and there is no way to say this without sounding like a philosopherNot Basic. A person who gives their time to the deep questions of being and knowledge. at a bad partyBasic word. — a mark whose being is dependent on its contextNot Basic.. It is there and not there at the same time. It is the Schrödinger'sNot Basic. Erwin Schrödinger, 1887–1961. An Austrian man of science who said that a cat in a box might be living and dead at the same time till someone looks. cat of typographyNot Basic.. And the thing that makes the box open — the thing that makes the hyphenNot Basic. come to be or not come to be — is the width of the window. The reader, by making the window wider or smaller, is collapsingNot Basic. Making a thing go from two possible states to one. the typographicNot Basic. wavefunctionNot Basic. In the science of very small things: a way of writing down all the possible states a thing might be in..

X — The direction marks, or: the politics of nothing

UnicodeNot Basic. has two more invisibleNot Basic. signs that take up no room and do important work. They are U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK and U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK.

Most of the world's writing goes from left to right. But ArabicNot Basic. and HebrewNot Basic. The language and writing of the Jewish people. go from right to left. And when left-to-right text and right-to-left text are on the same line — which happens all the time, because an ArabicNot Basic. sentenceNot Basic. A group of words that makes a complete thought. may have an English word in it, or an English sentenceNot Basic. may have an ArabicNot Basic. name in it — the algorithmNot Basic. that puts the letters on the page has to make a decision: which way does this part go?

The algorithmNot Basic. is good. It gets it right most of the time. But sometimes it gets it wrong, and when it gets it wrong, the text is read in the wrong order, and the sense is turned round. And the way you put it right is by putting in an invisibleNot Basic. sign — a zero-width nothing — that says "from here, go left to right" or "from here, go right to left."

The direction of reading — the most basic politicalNot Basic. Of or about the government and ordering of groups of persons. fact of a writing system, the thing that says "we start here and go that way" — is controlled by an invisibleNot Basic. sign that takes up no room. The sign is a policyNot Basic. A rule for how things are to be done.. It is not seen. It is not a letter. It has no form. But it says which way the letters go, and that is the most fundamentalNot Basic. "Of the base" or "of the root" would be Basic. thing a writing system does.

XI — The   in HTML, or: the space that means "I am here"

In the early days of the World Wide WebNot Basic. The system of pages connected by links on the internet. Made by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989., HTMLNot Basic. had a rule that has caused more confusionNot Basic. The state of not being clear about a thing. than almost any other rule in the history of computingNot Basic. The use of machines for doing number-work and other work.: white space collapseNot Basic in this use..

The rule says: if there are two or more spaces in a line, they become one space. If there is a line break in the sourceBasic word, but used here in a special sense. codeNot Basic., it becomes one space. If there is a tabNot Basic in this use. A wider space, used to make things line up., it becomes one space. All white space is crushed down to one space. You may put seventeen spaces between two words in your HTMLNot Basic. and the browserNot Basic. The programNot Basic. A list of orders for a machine. that takes you to pages on the World Wide Web. will show one.

This is why   became the most used HTMLNot Basic. entityNot Basic. A thing that is. in history. Not because people needed non-breaking spaces. Because people needed spaces. When a web maker in 1997 wantedBasic word (past of "want"). to put five spaces between two things — for alignmentNot Basic. Making things line up., for indentationNot Basic. Moving the start of a line to the right., for the simple animal pleasure of putting a bit more air between things — the only way was      . Five non-breaking spaces. Each one saying: "I am here. I am a space. I have not been crushed. I am still here."

The non-breaking space became the working person's space. The space that HTMLNot Basic. could not take away. The space that said: "You may collapseNot Basic. the normal spaces. You may crush them down to one. But I am not a normal space. I am  . I am named. I have a name. And you may not crush a thing that has a name."

This is gorgeousNot Basic. Very beautiful.. And it is a misuseNot Basic. Wrong use.. The   was not made for this. It was made to keep words together. It was made for "100 km" and "Mr. Smith" and "World War II." It was made for precisionNot Basic.. Instead it became the sledgehammerNot Basic. A very great and heavy hammer. of web layoutNot Basic. The way things are placed on a page.. It became the thing people used when they did not have the right tool and needed any tool at all.

And here is the beautiful thing: it worked. It was wrong, and it worked. Millions of pages were made with   as a structuralNot Basic. Of the form of how things are put together. element — as indentationNot Basic., as alignmentNot Basic., as a column of nothing in a table. The wrong tool did the right thing. The non-breaking space, designedNot Basic. Made with a purpose. to keep two words together, was used to keep the whole early web together.

XII — The flag

Every flag emojiNot Basic. in UnicodeNot Basic. is made of two invisibleNot Basic. parts. Not letters. Not numbers. RegionalNot Basic. Of a part of the world. indicatorNot Basic. A sign that points to something. signs. There are 26 of them, one for each letter of the alphabetNot Basic. The ordered list of all the letters., from U+1F1E6 (A) to U+1F1FF (Z). Each one, by itself, is nothing — just an abstractNot Basic. A thing with no physical form. letter in a special categoryNot Basic. A group of things that are of the same kind.. But when you put two of them together, the system reads them as a country codeNot Basic. and shows a flag.

🇸🇪 is not a picture that was put into UnicodeNot Basic.. It is two invisibleNot Basic. letters — 🇸 and 🇪, which are the regionalNot Basic. indicatorsNot Basic. for S and E, which is the ISONot Basic. The International Organization for Standardization. The great body that makes rules for everything. country codeNot Basic. for Sweden — and the system puts them together and shows the SwedishNot Basic. Of Sweden. flag. The flag does not existNot Basic. "Is" or "has being" would be Basic. in UnicodeNot Basic.. The letters existNot Basic.. The flag is what happens when the letters meet. The flag is a relationshipNot Basic., not a thing.

This is the ZWJNot Basic. patternNot Basic. again. The family emojiNot Basic. is persons joined by invisibleNot Basic. nothings. The flag emojiNot Basic. is abstractNot Basic. letters that, by being near each other, become a picture. In both cases, the thing you see is not encodedNot Basic. in any one part. It is encodedNot Basic. in the meeting of the parts. The space between things — the relationshipNot Basic. — is where the meaningNot Basic. "Sense" would be Basic. is.

XIII — The space you are reading through right now

This page is in JetBrains MonoNot Basic. A monospace typeface made by JetBrains, a company that makes instruments for writing programs. Every letter and space in JetBrains Mono is the same width.. A monospaceNot Basic. typeface. Every letter is the same width. Every space is the same width. The i and the m and the W and the . all take up the same room. This is not normal. In a proportionalNot Basic. typeface — like the one used in most books — the letters have different widths. An m is wide. An i is narrow. A space is a thing that lives between them and its width is what the designerNot Basic. A person who makes the form of things. of the typeface thought best.

In a monospaceNot Basic. typeface, the space has been given the same room as every letter. It is as wide as an A. As wide as a W. As wide as a period. This is democraticNot Basic. When every person (or thing) has the same say or the same room.. And it looks strange. There is more air between words than you are used to, because the space has been given the same status as the letters, and the letters are wide, so the space is wide too.

This is why monospaceNot Basic. is used for codeNot Basic.. Not because it is beautiful (it is, but that is not the reason). Because it makes the invisibleNot Basic. visibleNot Basic.. Every space is as loud as every letter. You can see the spaces. You can count the spaces. The nothing has the same weight as the something, and this is what you need when the spaces are the structureNot Basic. The form of how things are put together. — when indentationNot Basic. is meaningNot Basic., when the space at the start of a line says "this is inside that."

PythonNot Basic. A language for writing orders for machines. Named after Monty Python. — a language for machines — makes this literalNot Basic.. In PythonNot Basic., the spaces at the start of a line are not for the eyes. They are for the machine. They are the structureNot Basic.. Take them away and the programNot Basic. does not work. The nothing is load-bearingNot Basic. Holding up the weight. A wall that, if taken away, would make the building come down..

XIV — The connection to everything

The four paper said that a generativeNot Basic. tautologyNot Basic. is a thing that says nothing about itself but says that the system existsNot Basic.. 4/4 says: time signaturesNot Basic. are a thing. She/her says: pronounNot Basic. A word that takes the place of a name: I, you, he, she, it, we, they. declarationsNot Basic. A saying of what is. are a thing. "That's why it's called money" says: circularNot Basic. Going round in a ring. value is a thing.

The space is the generativeNot Basic. tautologyNot Basic. of text itself. It says nothing. It is nothing. But it says: there is a system for putting marks on a surface, and the system has rules about the nothing between the marks, and those rules are more important than the marks.

The zero-width joiner makes a family out of persons. The soft hyphenNot Basic. comes to be or does not come to be depending on how much room there is. The directionBasic word. mark controls which way you read without being seen. The non-breaking space says "do not cut here" while being the same amount of nothing as the space that says "you may cut here." The regionalNot Basic. indicatorsNot Basic. are abstractNot Basic. letters that become a flag when they meet.

All of these are invisibleNot Basic.. All of them take up little or no room. All of them do work that the visibleNot Basic. signs cannot do. The visibleNot Basic. signs are the content. The invisibleNot Basic. signs are the structureNot Basic.. The letters are the words. The spaces are the grammarNot Basic. The rules for how words are put in order..

And the most important thing — the thing this paper has been working round to — is that the spaces came first. Not in time (they came after the letters, historicallyNot Basic. In the story of what has been.). But in the order of what matters. You can change every letter in a line and it is still a line. You can change the spaces and it is not a line. It is noise. The spaces are what make text text. The nothing is the thing. The room between the words is the grammarNot Basic.. The air is the structureNot Basic.. The part with no marks on it is the most important part of the page.

Tschichold was right.