This, like almost every typing training system out there, suffers from my pet peeve: if you type an extra character or miss a character, then you end up with a series of “mistakes” instead of just one.
Why don’t these programs use some form of edit distance? I’m sure that one could come up with a way to freeze the edit beyond some distance from the caret to reduce the potential for spooky UI action at a distance.
I was trained to type two spaces after a period: it's in my muscle memory. This website treats it as a mistake. No typing teacher would downgrade for that. It's awful.
It's true that the space between sentences should be larger than the space between words, as it is in properly typeset text, though not twice as large. Using two spaces is a way to approximate that when you only have monospaced fonts. It's no longer encouraged in electronic text when using proportional fonts because the rendering software _should_ adjust the spacing itself.
It "should" adjust, but in practice most software do not render spaces after periods properly. There is no in band signal to distinguish periods for sentence ends vs e.g. Mr. Thus there is a clear argument for double spacing in all contexts
Buddy, there are rules and there are recommendations. The fact that it was common practice to use two spaces after a period up until the early 2000s in many situations shows that it is not in fact a rule, which is linguistic (as in the capitalization rules for proper nouns), but a recommendation, which is stylistic.
Stylistic recommendations can also be taken as rules, but in limited situations, such as a place of work saying we follow these guidelines (a manual of recommendations), which then become rules for that workplace.
Finally this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing shows that their complaint has some merit, because the spacing used are not rules of the language, but conventions or recommendations imposed to improve the production of text based on the requirements and limitations of a particular technology.
on edit: probably shouldn't describe capitalization as being a linguistic rule, as it is an orthographic rule...heat of the moment, sorry. One might argue that the same applies to spacing, but I suppose that capitalization in orthography has been established for so long, and in so many different systems that it can be claimed a rule whereas spacing is still just a recommendation.
It was on typewriters because the fonts were monospace so the period would have some extra space to its left, the double space after it made it easier to see at a glance where a new sentence occurs.
I don't really get this. This is how it should work, no? The point is to type the word correctly; if you miss a letter or mistype, and keep typing, then yeah, it's several mistakes in a row?
Say I type out the Iliad absolutely perfect, but on the first character I accidentally type an extra 'R'. Would you say that I typed it 0% correctly? Because this, and many other typing testers would score it that way, simply because every character after that is now shifted over by one. Ironically, later on missing a character would actually improve your score.
No, the point is to type the word a you'd do in real life, that is, make the mistake, finish word/sentence/thought and then correct. And the correction would be changing just the first mistake
> the point is to type the word a you'd do in real life,
I don't really know about that. I think the point is to practice typing, and that may or may not reflect how you type in everyday life. For example, most people don't spend their time typing random words without numbers or punctuation :)
In any case, are you saying that if you correct a word during one of these tests, it simply should not count as a mistake? Because if not, then I don't see what the problem is again - typ.ing and most other sites note corrections, and distinguish between corrected and uncorrected mistakes.
If so, I guess we might just disagree on what the point of these exercises is.
I don't see how this can be so difficult to understand. If the second word in my first sentence were misspelled, does that make every other word or letter that comes after wrong?
My muscle memory usually presses ctrl-backspace when I mistype a word, which typ.ing actually handles better than most typing software, which is to say ctrl-backspace does what I expect, it deletes the word and I can retype it, which is what I do normally.
Why don’t these programs use some form of edit distance? I’m sure that one could come up with a way to freeze the edit beyond some distance from the caret to reduce the potential for spooky UI action at a distance.