From: Stephan Stiller (sstiller@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 01 2011 - 17:26:56 CST
Dear list,
> For your rules for text transformation in css
> (http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-text/#text-transform)
> I would limit setting rules for titlecasing, that is I might specify
> for that nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns should be capitalized in
> English titles, but would not specify other more "fuzzy" rules.
In English, capitalization of words in titles/headlines is definitely
not standardized, and there is great variation. (Same thing for
hyphenation, btw.) I tried to find an authoritative reference to support
this statement, but even the comprehensive "Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language" by Huddlestone and Pullum (pp. 1757-1758) is rather
brief on this topic - though it does say, "The precise way in which
capitalised expressions are marked is subject to some variation". And at
least one of Mr. Whitehead's CMOS references hints at there being
variation. But simply take 4-5 different academic conference proceedings
and compare their title-casing and hyphenation practices for accepted
papers - you'll sometimes find ghastly inconsistencies even within the
same title.
Note that the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication records
capitalize only the first word and proper names: "According to
traditional library practice, only the first word of a title as well as
any proper names which occur in the title are capitalized." (CIP
publishers manual, 4th ed., p. 31). I'm not at all saying that LoC is an
authority in style matters but rather that in fact it perhaps doesn't
matter all that much if there's variation.
(And while we're at it, note that CMOS doesn't necessarily follow
majority practice for everything - it's a prescriptive guide, not a
descriptive manual.)
I mostly agree with Mr. Whitehead's practice. I even think that there is
a "best" way that balances linguistic principles with de-facto
present-day practice (and for what that would be this list is probably
not the right discussion forum, so I'll refrain), but it seems like
prescribing too much in this domain in a Unicode spec (to answer one of
Koji Ishii's original questions) should be avoided if possible, given
the current state of rampant variation.
Stephan Stiller
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
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