Re: Last Call for DOM Level 3 Load and Save

Ray Whitmer <raydwhitmer@aol.com> wrote:

> I think you may correct although I was taught to use apostrophe in this 
> case.

The leading authority on the issue is generally agreed to be Professor Robert
T. Angryflower, whose seminal paper on the issue is at last available on
the web, at his academic site:

  http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Seriously, apostrophes for plural abbreviations are widely considered
the Wrong Thing in British English at least, despite their widespread
use. Some - for example the style guide you quoted - advocate them for
cases where the lack of punctuation could also cause confusion, for example
"there are two Is in imitate" vs. "I's", though situations like this can
often be avoided by other means.

"URIs" isn't one of those cases, anyway, so regardless of the merits of
the argument one would irritate fewer pedants this way. ;-)

> We are clearly dealing with camel casing when naming multiple-word 
> things, which is used throughout the specification, for example: 
> Document.documentURI.

On the other hand, other methods are using 'uri', and throughout the spec
parameters are always begun with a lower case character, in keeping with
common style from languages like Java.

The naming issue is not normally important, of course, but it could
conceivably have an impact in Python, where parameters can be passed by
name as well as position in the argument list.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and@doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 12:24:54 UTC