Associate
- Joined
- 29 May 2003
- Posts
- 2,038
- Location
- Cambridge
Our client features a course they provide on their website with a rather long-winded name and therefore follows it with the abbreviation in brackets thus:
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
We have been asked to put spaces inside the brackets:
( PCI DSS )
To my mind, with my background in typography, that is grammatically and visually wrong. They have been told by a web specialist that they must have spaces inside the brackets else a search engine spider will see the brackets as part of the word if someone searches for PCI DSS. That sounds dubious to me - is he right?
Assuming he's right hypothetically, with a space inside the brackets, if the abbreviation falls at the end of a line of text, it could mean that just the bracket will turn over to the next line, which is going to look horrible. In print you'd prevent that by putting a non-breaking space in, but I couldn't put a ' ' in because it would mess up the spider in the same way that not having a space would, wouldn't it?
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
We have been asked to put spaces inside the brackets:
( PCI DSS )
To my mind, with my background in typography, that is grammatically and visually wrong. They have been told by a web specialist that they must have spaces inside the brackets else a search engine spider will see the brackets as part of the word if someone searches for PCI DSS. That sounds dubious to me - is he right?
Assuming he's right hypothetically, with a space inside the brackets, if the abbreviation falls at the end of a line of text, it could mean that just the bracket will turn over to the next line, which is going to look horrible. In print you'd prevent that by putting a non-breaking space in, but I couldn't put a ' ' in because it would mess up the spider in the same way that not having a space would, wouldn't it?