Hacker News Reader

Comment by dca | Hacker News Reader

Apparently so do their shift keys.

And their kerning.

EDIT: Yep, http://norbu09.org/css/screen.css:

  #content p {
    line-height: 140%;
    letter-spacing: -0.03em;
  }

does it bother you that people don't capitalize properly in their personal blogs? i never understood that. i read through it just fine.

i know it's proper, but i guess i'm kind of lazy in that way. in the words of christopher walken: "i never liked capitalization. it felt like more of an imposition."

th prblm s nt tht ts mprpr, bt tht yr gvng th rdr lss nfrmtn

if acronyms and proper names were capitalized, we'd have everything covered? punctuation already signals the end of a sentence.

i could read and comprehend what you said in your example, but it required more mental effort. i don't think reading a blog without caps requires more mental effort, but if it does to most people, then i might have to switch back.

Only 1/3 of the periods in e.g. this sentence signal the end of it.

i believe the correct grammatical use of "e.g." uses commas anyway, in which case i would have easily understood the example without caps:

only 1/3 of the periods in, e.g., this sentence, signal the end of it.

No, whether you want commas depends on the sentence. Most good writers wouldn't punctuate that sentence as you did. Too halting for such a short sentence.

But this is not the point here, is it? The point is that any abbreviation with periods in it could appear in the middle of a sentence.

i don't think i'd use it that way either. i did a quick google search to check and the first thing that came up was this: http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/abbreviations/f/ievseg.ht...

i can only think of three exceptions where you'd need capitalization for additional information: acronyms, proper names, and abbreviations.

i've been doing this as a test since may 13, 2009. i've never run into the problem of a misunderstanding before due to lowercase and i usually write this way in all casual written forms of communication (email, sms texting, blogs, comments). i originally picked it up from a designer i admired back in 2008, and the habit kind of stuck after trying it.

But it's not about misunderstanding. We've all been on the Internet long enough to be able to slog through 1337speak and poor spelling and grammar, if we have to, with probably 99% understanding. However, it takes longer. As it is with capitalization--it doesn't prevent overall understanding, but it does slow it down, at least a little.

That said, maybe that's acceptable to you. Maybe you're going for a certain aesthetic.

the point pg made, which i was responding to, was: "it's not about being improper, it's that you're giving the reader less information," so i was addressing that.

the original point was "does it slow you down to read this blog because there are no caps?" i don't know whether a majority of people read lowercase slower--nobody has mentioned it since i started doing it a year ago. i personally have no problems with it; i'm not doing stuff like omitting vowels (an extreme example to make a point, imo). i'm just skipping over the shift key.

it's not about aesthetics in my case. more about laziness in typing, and i don't want to do something just because "that's the way it's always been done."

It looks like no-vowels slows down my reading to about 50% of original speed, whereas no-caps slows me down only to maybe 90%. This might be because I spend so much time on IRC.

I just found it to be an unnecessary distraction.

It's not that it bothers me. It just makes it more difficult than necessary for me to read. I make an assumption that by posting something on the internet, the person wants me to read it and wants to share their ideas with me.

Why distract readers from one's ideas by not following simple grammatical convention?

It bothers me; lack of capitalization makes me think a person didn't care enough to read over what they wrote even if it is just looking at the text as they write it.

Well, there was a politicised line of thought in 20C modernist typography towards abandoning capitals due to their implied hierarchies. Herbert Bayer’s experimental Architype (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_Architype) would be one example of a specific typeface designed with this in mind, but there were also many other typographic designs of the time which abandoned capitalisation.

We’re still seeing the filter down of these experiments now, every few years another company rebrands and drops their capital letters to “humanise” their image or some such reasoning.

So… maybe it was a conscious decision by the author along these lines. Or as you say probably just a broken shift key.

my shift key is fine (programming in erlang actually forces me to use it) but growing up in a non english country - and being forced to a lot more capitalization than english has - made me decide to refuse the capitalization thing entirely. it was a mix of movement and point against overly stressing the beginning of sentences and i somehow stuck with it. did not think that is was that much of a problem though :-)

It's not a huge problem. I enjoyed your post and can relate. Thanks for sharing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com