The web had little to do with APA’s decision to adopt one space as the standard. It was desktop fonts in the mid-eighties. Two spaces emerged as a standard when fonts were monospaced - they were a readability hack. When proportional fonts started to be introduced, two spaces began to look visually odd. That oddness was especially apparent in groups of sentences like.

“It’s hard to learn how to spell. It takes practice, patience and a lot of dedication.”

^ In a proportional font the difference in width between ‘ll’ and ‘ ‘ is noticeable. In a monotypes font, two spaces after a period provide a visual cue that that space is different.

I think this is why this all lowercase style of writing pisses me off so much. Readability used to be important enough to create controversy - nobody cares anymore. But, I didn’t care enough to read the whole article so maybe I missed something.

> First time I've seen it. It will be interesting to see if that trends.

It's not a new trend, I'm surprised you never noticed it. It dates back to at least a decade. It's mostly used to signal informal/hipster speak, i.e. you're writing as you would type in a chat window (or Twitter), without care for punctuation or syntax.

It already trends among a certain generation of people.

I hate it, needless to say. Anything that impedes my reading of mid/long form text is unwelcome.