Re: [css3-text] text-transform:capitalize

On Feb 21, 2011, at 7:06 PM, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> 
> Hence, in this context, Mark is correct that "capitalize" is ambiguous.

I don't disagree with that assertion. It certainly is ambiguous, and if someone told me to capitalize the string 'the quick brown fox' I might quite reasonably respond with 'The quick brown fox', or the 'The Quick Brown Fox' or 'THE QUICK BROWN FOX'. However, the term title case, when applied to a string, is also ambiguous, and a very common meaning is to re-write it using language specific rules for titles.

> 
> Unicode has defined the terms Uppsercase, Lowercase and Titlecase in very precise ways. Building on these defintions would seem useful.

Unicode defines titlecase in a specific way for words, but it leaves the term ambiguous for strings (what we are referring to here) as well as leaving the definition of a word open. The examples they provide for titlecasing strings would all fail with the proposed algorithm, so it seems inappropriate to use that term as the value of the transformation. As you point out, uppercase and title case are different, so we can't remove the term from our definition, but it doesn't seem helpful to change the name of the value since there at least does exist a meaning of capitalize when applied to a string that could mean making the first letter of a word uppercase. Our definition can remove the ambiguity by clearly stating that Titlecase_Mapping should be applied to the first character of every word and explaining that UAX#29 should be used for word breaks. Again, I just don't see any benefit in changing the name of the value. 

--Brady

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2011 03:43:03 UTC