Re: Last Call for DOM Level 3 Load and Save

and-w3@doxdesk.com wrote:

>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.
>  
>
I am not arguing that we should settle on URI's, but you 
mischaracterized the one example I cited that clearly did not restrict 
it as you claim, but only said "Rarely" and I quote from its examples:

    * Instead of &'s in your sentences, use and's and other additive
      conjunctions.
    * Most of my friends have M.S.'s and PhD's.
    * Mind your P's and Q's.
    * She used to sell BMW's; now she sells IRA'S at BofA's throughout
      the state.

The explanation was that without the apostrophe, it is confusing whether 
the s is part of the abbreviation or not.  The argument could be made 
that because these acronyms are typically all-caps, adding the s to the 
end is not too ambiguous (assuming that the upper-case S used to make 
IRA plural is an error) but that is not a case made by the cited page or 
its examples.  I find the example of BMW's hardly different from that of 
URI's.  

>>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.
>  
>
Sorry, I rushed that one and thought you were talking about writeURI and 
not the URI parameter.  It is not about camel casing, and should be made 
consistent with other parameters.  You are correct.

Ray

Received on Friday, 27 June 2003 13:02:08 UTC