[mb-users] Capitalisation or not

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On 8/28/06, Stefan Kestenholz <keschte at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, i've discussed that with olivier once already, too -- Guess Case
> already implements it as "'round" (there was a ticket which requested this,
> but i'm not sure there was an "official" decision made), and i've told him
> so after he went through the listing and changed all instances of the
> specific song to "'Round". I however can see his reasoning, that it looks
> odd, if the beginning of the title is not capitalized (ie. if the apostrophe
> does not counted as a "real" character).

My personal preference is lower-case, but it's hard to justify it.

I think the purpose of title capitalisation is to emphasize the title
(presumably, to make it stand out) and the most important words of it,
not the letters themselves. By this reasoning, even if letters are
dropped, we should still emphasize the word with a capital (provided).
Otherwise, there's also a symmetry breaking; most long words are
capitalized in our titles, so this would look weird.

There is an argument for lowercasing such words, though: the capital
is much more visible than the apostrophe. In my case this changes the
way I visualy parse the word: I read first "Round" (which doesn't make
sense in the context), then I spot the apostrophe and re-read the
correct title. Following the above conjecture that title
capitalization is supposed to make the title stand out, it would make
little sense to use a pattern that lowers the readability of the
title. In this context, _'round Midnight_ is more readable than
_'Round Midnight_, _for_me_, because I read the correct meaning
quicker. But I'm not sure that's true in general.

> it would be interesting to get a list of titles which have this pattern, and
> follow the most used variant in capitalization, instead of having to change
> a lot of titles -- do you agree this would be a reasonable aproach?

This is reasonable from the "least work" perspective, at least :) In
this case I think we can afford to make a 'correct' judgement and make
up our own rule, but I'm not sure we can agree on the correct version,
and I fear another flamefest.

I suppose you can't make the query without direct SQL on the database,
lucene doesn't seem to accept non-alphanumeric searches.

-- Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.