Re: CSS Title Capitalization

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 9:00 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yup.  Basically: you can't do it *at all* without knowing the language
> that the text is in, and you can't do it even with the language
> information, for some languages, without a lot of complicated rules.
> English has it pretty easy here.  It's a ton of effort and
> complication for something that won't even work for most content
> (since most content isn't language-tagged), and so not really worth
> pursuing.

It's tough in (American) English. To quote from the Chicago Manual of
Style (14th edition, 7.127):

"In regular title capitalization, also known as headline style, the
first and last words and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs,
adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions (if, because, as, that, etc.)
are capitalized. Articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions
(and, but, or, for, nor) and prepositions, regardless of length, are
lowercased unless they are the first or last word of the title or
subtitle. The 'to' in infinitives is also lowercased. Long titles of
works published in earlier centuries may retain the original
capitalization, except that any word in full capitals should carry
only an initial capital. No word in a quoted title should ever be set
in full capitals, regardless of how it appears on the title page of
the book itself, unless it is an acronym, such as WAC, UNICEF, or
FORTRAN."

The subject of capitalization in general takes up sixty pages in this
book. I've spent lots of time fixing capitalization in ebooks (bad
offshore XML conversions leave lots of stuff in all-caps if it was
designed that way) and I don't even trust myself to get it right in
all circumstances. That's why we have professional editors.

Dave

Received on Friday, 23 January 2015 02:28:29 UTC