I would not have to manually insert space between words with  either.

I take it you mean sentences; joining words with it makes for HTML display disasters. That’s bad style today and going back decades so affording it… If one wanted to attempt a more traditional approach, pedanticism demands   but then you should probably also be applying   or some other traditional typesetting non-\x{20} space for word separation.

If not for such incompatibuilities, we never would have needed HTML to bridge the divide.

That is an extremely odd thing to say…