As for commas — and periods! — outside of quotes, I note that the British Commonwealth countries have largely adopted this so-called logical quotation style as the new standard, though the old standard is still considered acceptable. It’s similar to how other European languages handle quotation marks and the punctuation near them.

The older convention, which we still use in the U.S., was originally adopted for typographical reasons, since it tends to look better on the printed page. It’s meant to approximate having the glyph for the period or comma lined up vertically under the quotation mark.

I simply can’t stand the new style, and I’m glad most U.S. publications are sticking with the more conservative typographical convention. It saddens me that Wikipedia adopted logical quotation, though even I have to admit it works better for some highly technical or mathematical prose.

With the advent of modern word processors and document processing systems (e.g., TeX, LaTeX, Scribe), adding a second space after the period is superfluous, since the system is supposed to calculate exactly how much whitespace should be inserted after various forms of punctuation.

As for starting sentences with “and” and “but,” it is still frowned upon to start sentences with conjunctions — especially when one does this excessively, or when writing formally. The main case where you can get away with doing this is dialog in fiction, or in a biography, when reporting what was actually said. It has become acceptable to start sentences with “but” in general prose, especially as it can be very powerful stylistically, but should be done with care. I haven’t seen this done quite as frequently with “and.” There are perfectly good words to use if you want to avoid seeming overly informal (e.g., however instead of but).

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/can-you-start-sentences-with-%E2%80%9Cand%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cbut%E2%80%9D/

The rules change over time. And some fads come into fashion, go out of fashion, and come back into fashion (see the so-called Oxford comma, aka the serial comma). At some point, you get old enough or tired enough of changing with the times that you settle upon your own style, and you tend to not change it unless an editor tells you to.

“The problem is partly caused by people too stupid or lazy to learn the
language, but it’s also caused by people that are too smart or anal that
change the rules of our language.”

I’ll agree with the former sentiment, but the latter sentiment makes no sense. What does it mean to be “too smart”? (In my estimation, there’s no such thing. This smacks of offensive anti-intellectualism to me.) Many “anal” people are actually quite conservative and resist changes to the language, which is the opposite of what you accuse them of.

The problem is partly caused by people too stupid or lazy to learn the language, but it’s also caused by people that are too smart or anal that change the rules of our language.

Latin had very few rules, and it rarely, if ever, broke one of them.
English has thousands of rules, and every one of them has numerous exceptions.

Thank you for calling out tech(nology) bloggers on what has strangely become acceptable practice. Unfortunately the grammar issues are as likely to disappear as are the biases held by various tech(nology) blogs (blatant, though almost never explicitly stated).

My only complaint, and I only bring it up because you asked, is the use of the word ‘But’ to initiate at least a couple of sentences.

I’m sorry if this seemed overly harsh. And again, this comment doesn’t apply to the above article.

Now I mostly read here and Ars Technica.

And your English teacher was very wise. I think you have to be good at following the rules before you can find truly interesting ways to break them. People who break rules they don’t understand, artistically speaking, do so in a very dull way.

I am curious about why you wrote Internet sites ‘who’, instead of Internet sites ‘that’. A career law clerk to a judge I clerked for used to get on me about commas outside of quotes, but I have always played with that rule because I am a REBEL!!! [And Chris Davies does it, that British sauce bucket.]

If you are paid to write, then write, RIGHT?

I admire your boldness and candor!