[development] Changes to capitalization

Larry Garfield larry at garfieldtech.com
Thu Sep 14 02:45:56 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 13 September 2006 08:58, Syscrusher wrote:

> 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.

I am going to "me too" sticking with the current all-lowercase standard.

- It's easier to remember than "wait, do we capitalize first word, all words 
or just important words?"  One less thing for me to have to keep track of.

- It's one less thing to break, especially during a freeze but at any time.  

- It doesn't buy us anything.  Going through conversion pain for a clear 
benefit is one thing, but I don't see how this gets us anything.  You can 
still get the capitalization you want now via CSS or, if you have a weird 
case where that wouldn't work, you can selectively translate strings.

- It's putting style into the code.  Style belongs in CSS, right? :-)

If there's currently a confusion in core where some things are mixed case and 
some are all-lowercase, then yes, that's a bug.  The fix for that bug is to 
correct the mixed-case labels to lowercase.

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, 
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to 
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession 
of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."  -- Thomas 
Jefferson


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