- From: Zack Weinberg <zweinberg@mozilla.com>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:27:24 -0700
- To: szukw000@arcor.de
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
szukw000@arcor.de wrote: > I have to make some proposals for corrections regarding the > > Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification > W3C Candidate Recommendation 23 April 2009 No comment on anything else, but ... > LAST PROPOSAL: > ============== > > As far as I know, "there's" and "can't" and "isn't" are spoken > English. They should not appear in a written specification. ... this is not true. Contractions are perfectly fine in formal written English. "There's" is more informal than the contractions involving "not", but still fine. *Avoiding* contractions in writing makes the text sound stilted, sometimes to the point of disfluency. Neither should one mechanically contract everything that *can* be contracted -- authors may choose one possible form over another to make the text flow more smoothly, or to express a subtle shade of meaning. For instance, if I had written "this isn't true" above the emphasis would have been wrong. zw
Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 18:28:06 UTC