Hi Joachim, Humdinger wrote:
To me it is counterproductive to be anal about things like this. I can understand the need for coding standards, and things like icon guidelines, where a consistent look is desirable, but rules like "First and Third words should be Capitalized; middle ones should not" are arbitrary and pointless. And they lead to bad usage, like the examples I quoted before.The analogy with the coding guidelines is a good one. I think it's the very same thing. Arbitrary to some extend, but if everyone abides by the rules, consistency ensues. "First and Third words should be Capitalized; middle ones should not" was never proposed, so taking that to ridicule the need for simple rules won't help.
<snip...>Code readability by programmers should not be the criteria for capitalization that will affect a wide range of users, many io whom have never been exposed to even a line of code. This is really something relative to the English language, not programming rules.
I'd much rather try to mold the previously stated rules to something sensible. For convenience:
<snip...>
These are all open to debate. However, as I said before, since Apple is using them, there might be something to it, even if it's not obvious to the layman (which we all are to various degrees when it comes to professional user interaction research).
Still, we should try to find a few minimal rules everyone can live with. Else we end up with every app having its own convention. Or several. There a few examples where capitalization is mixed even within a menu... (Pe: Search menu).
I really don't want to be all rectal on this, but consistency is close to my heart. And if I look over all the strings in the system, I don't want to work on patches for a week that won't get committed, because somebody vetos the style.
The English language already has rules of capitalization. Instead of trying to come up with some arbitrary guidelines that violate capitalization from a linguistic POV, following the existing rules is what should be done. That is the way to go, not to try to find some arbitrary rule that seems more natural to programmers or foreigners (myself included).
Cheers! Jorge/aka Koki
