[development] Changes to capitalization

[Syscrusher]

On Wednesday 13 September 2006 03:06, Farsheed wrote:
> > You can get close with text-transform: capitalize,
> > but this capitalizes 
> > all the first letters. And, up to now, it seems the
> 
> Actually, you can use a pseudo-element to capitalize
> only the first letter:
> 
> p:first-letter 
> {
>   text-transform: uppercase;
> }

I read what someone (not Farsheed) said on this thread about not wanting to
capitalize because that would be putting a thematic choice into Drupal core.
In my personal opinion, having all-lowercase is also a thematic choice in its
own right; see also "e. e. cummings". :-) Whatever we pick, it is a thematic
choice.

But, that being said, I think at the core level we need to make a choice of
something extremely consistent and stay with it. I don't mind updating my
contrib modules for new API changes, but *please* don't make me also have to
edit my string constants every couple of releases just to change capitalization.

With that in mind, my preference would be to leave Drupal core as it is now,
all lower case, and encourage themes to use "text-transform: capitalize" or the
"first-letter" pseudo-element as described above.

All lower case is very easy for a programmer to remember -- not that we're too
stupid to think of other things (re: the comment about security/scalability/etc.),
but simply that we don't need one more thing to worry about when there is little
value-add in doing so. When I'm writing a contrib module, let me think about
the functionality of the code and nothing else.

So, -1 for changing capitalization in Drupal core for 5.0.

And +1 for adding the two excellent CSS suggestions I've quoted above into
  Drupal's theme and module documentation -- remember, not everyone who
  deploys Drupal and decides to customize their CSS will be an expert at CSS.
  This one style may be the only thing they want to change from a prebuilt
  theme's stylesheet. I'd also recommend cross-referencing that documentation
  from the programmers' guide where it states the lowercase policy, since it
  is also relevant there.

Scott

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Syscrusher (Scott Courtney)          Drupal page:   http://drupal.org/user/9184
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