[mb-users] Capitalisation or not

[Simon Reinhardt]

Bogdan Butnaru wrote:
> 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.

Good arguments there. Now I don't have a preference any more. :)

Stefan Kestenholz wrote:
> 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?

I don't know if this would be representive for the preference of the majority. You said GC changes it to "'round" so the current data is already strongly influenced by this and probably not what most people would have set if they had done it by hand instead of pressing the buttons. :)

Simon (Shepard)