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Comment by jxcole | Hacker News Reader

Ok. I hope I'm not going against the rules of HN discourse here but I'd like to go out on a limb and say any article in which the author doesn't bother capitalizing the first word in his sentences is not an article I'm going to bother to read. One of the few things I miss about the world before the internet is a proper adherence to grammar. If he were ESL, I would be more forgiving, but this post just smacks of lazy writing.

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It's obviously a deliberate choice, there are no capital letters on his entire site. I don't know much about the OP but in the design world the style isn't that alien.

It originated in the 20s and 30s in the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayer was one of the more prominent supporters, designing typefaces that contained no uppercase letterforms at all. He even experimented with designing entirely new alphabets that were phonetically based.

Jan Tschichold was another Bauhaus guy experimenting in the same realm. From Wikipedia: "Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. ... The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters."

It's interesting that it was born out of choices made to German, where they have many more capital letters in each sentence than we do in English. Regardless, it's clearly a stylistic choice, and one that the OP might even have to work harder to maintain, if he is accustomed to writing in sentence case.

There's that old saying that you must first learn the rules and then you can break them. That is exactly what is going on here, and the OP isn't unique in this. Throughout my time at design school many of my teachers, who had been educated by Bauhaus instructors, would email in only lowercase—they adopted the style. And others have adopted it from them (here's one of my design school friends' site: http://traceychan.net/ where she has).

I quite like the style myself.

That's fine for typeset print where other aids to scanning are used, such as a double space between sentences. HTML, though, removes the double space. Which means you have to consciously read every single word rather than scan and parse it in bulk.

To a fast reader, without visual cues it is a jumbled mess. I gave up after forcing myself to read three sentences.

It appears to be a style of his site. There isn't a single capital letter to be found. It's intentional rather than lazy, although it doesn't make it any less grammatically incorrect.

Intentional or not it makes people look upon his content as immature. You're not trying to win the opinions of like minded individuals, you're trying to sway opponents and to do that you have to work on their terms (formal, coherent writing)

I'd say he was probably going for more uniqueness factor. Lack of care of capitalization, shows just that - lack of care and possible desire to break the norms.

You would be right if his goal was to impress someone but I doubt that was intention of his blog.

Considering how consciously-designed his site seems to be, I assumed it was a deliberate choice.

It does go against the rules -- you are supposed to post interesting comments. If you don't want to read it, that is fine: simply close the tab and move on. No need to make a fuss.

Shrug That doesn't bother me nearly as much as all the instances I've seen lately of someone writing "it's" when they meant "its".

I guess we all have our little pet peeves :-)

Agreed--not a good design decision whether intentional or not. This works for logotype sometimes, but your eye needs the capitalization to make the reading easier and to help you identify where you're at in the text (especially longer text).

I skipped it for the same reason. I knew it was a stylistic choice, but I still didn't care to read what he had to say. I probably would go back and put up with it if the comments here made it seem like he had anything new to say on the piracy topic anyway, but I'm getting the opposite impression.

I would say you are being equally lazy as a reader. Do you stop reading when someone writes "ain't", or uses a slang term, or something else that doesn't conform precisely to Strunk & White?

I'm not exactly willing to die on this hill, though -- the article is not very good in any case.

you won't take 2 minutes to read the article for what it's worth, but will take 3+ minutes to write that you won't read it because he didn't capitalize his first word? haha.

edit: removed all capitalization so you can reply to me about how you won't read my comment because i am too lazy to capitalize a word.

It's an 85 word comment. Unless the author is unusually slow at typing (which is quite unlikely given the largely programmer-based audience here), it probably took them about a minute to write the comment.

Lack of capitalisation interrupts the way you read a block of text. People make poor design choices all the time, and this is one of them.

More more poking fun at the fact that he took more time to reply about why he wont read the article (which is ridiculous) than it would have taken to just read it and respond with valuable input instead of being snobby about it.

Reading this article, let alone reading and responding with valuable input, takes more time than writing a two-line comment, and not just because it's hard to scan sentences written without capital letters.

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