one vs. two spaces after periods

I never had strong feelings on this issue. I was taught two. At some point in high school I remember seeing my friend Josh type with one, and just thought it was crazy. "How can you break such a principle rule?" But he was taught a different principle rule. That was perhaps one of my first early exposure to the idea that grammatical rules were perhaps not all they had been made out to be. At some point I taught myself to type with one, but whatever, let people do what they want.

But then I read this, from a "two space" defender:

Manjoo’s argument about beauty [of using a single space], like all such arguments, is easy enough to dismiss: I disagree. I find it easier to read paragraphs that are composed of sentences separated by two spaces. Perhaps this is because I, like most technologists, spend most of my time working with (quite lovely!) fixed-width fonts for practical reasons. But there’s also a deeper beauty to the two space rule — a sort of mathematical beauty. Let me explain.

Consider the typical structure of writing. Letters are assembled into words, which turn into phrases, which are arranged into sentences — at the same time being assigned to speakers, a neat trick — which are then combined into paragraphs.

It’s a chemical process, a perfect and infinitely flexible hierarchical system that should command our admiration. Being able to rationally examine, disassemble and interrogate the final product is a mark of the system’s beauty. Anything less is settling for a sort of holistic mysticism.

It’s disrespectful to let writing’s constituent elements bleed into one another through imprecise demarcations.

So using two spaces does actually mean something: the reification of sentences as THE fundamental unit of language. Seeing it defended from a very linguisticky point of view is firming up my desire to take the "single space" side. Sometimes you want the sentences to bleed together, because they mean more as a functional unit than as two separate ones. Other times you dont. But I guess what I am really arguing for is a more "rule-less" approach: you shouldn't always use just one space, or always use two. You should choose the number of spaces you use as a signal of exactly how unitized two sentences are. I bet there are all kinds of correlates of that in spoken language; it would be interesting to try to mirror it in written language.

Also, it was sort of weird that this guy wrote this long defense of using two spaces between periods, while appearing to only use one space between the periods in the actual exposition...