Re: Proposal: Minor 'text-transform' property revision

On 2/19/14 11:40 AM, "Brian Blakely" <anewpage.media@gmail.com<mailto:anewpage.media@gmail.com>> wrote:

Digging this discussion back up.

text-transform: title is the missing link across a gap that still leaves content with the responsibility of informing capitalization styles.

I suggest adopting a "blacklist" of words to lowercase when this value is applied (capitalizing all others), following guidelines outlined by the MLA:

Do not capitalize the following parts of speech when they fall in the middle of a title:
  * Articles (a, an, the, as in "Under the Bamboo Tree")

  * Prepositions (e.g., against, between, in, of, to, as in "The Merchant of Venice and a Dialogue between the Soul and Body")

  * Coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet, as in "Romeo and Juliet")

  * The to in infinitives (as in "How to Play Chess")

Implementing a "Do Not Capitalize" list should be an achievable goal, as it focuses on word types, lists of which are available.

There are example implementations of programmatic title casing out there, such as:
http://titlecase.com/

I have larger concerns. How would you title case "DYLAN VAN DER SCHYFF TO PERFORM WITH NOW ORCHESTRA"? In this case NOW is an acronym. Dylan van der Schyff is a (very good!) Canadian drummer, but his name needs to be capitalized properly whatever the text language is. Different authors, organizations, and publishers have different practices around capitalization. My company would be more likely to use the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines than MLA. Even getting two editors at my company to agree on a particular example might be difficult.

This is a real problem for us, but I feel like the solution is to fix the content, not to guess what the content should have been.

Dave

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