by Gene Michael Stover
created 2023 November ??
updated Tuesday, 2026 June 16
original at cybertiggyr.com/ecob1wm.html
At a job I had circa 2022, we were asked not to avoid the words white or black unless we were talking about colours. (I know that any kindergartner would point out that white & black aren't colours — if I correctly remember what it was like as a kindergartner, which I probably don't because 1971(?) was a long time ago.)
So what replaces “white-space”?
What was formerly white-space becomes space junk which, besides satisfying the company's request, is a cleverer term than the old one.
Characters that are space junk include spaces, horizontal tabs (a.k.a. tab), & vertical tabs (a.k.a. form feeds). Given the size of the Unicode character set, it probably includes some more values.