Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
- Subject: Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
- From: Ali Ozer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 08:44:11 -0700
Alright, I'm going to point out the elegant simplicity of this semi-
verbosely:
If something is titled, title case is appropriate for the text,
because it is titled.
If something is untitled, then it is not titled; title case is
inappropriate as it is not a title and therefore should not be in
case which belongs to and is intended for titling.
That's it. Why should an untitled thing use title case? It
shouldn't---it's *untitled* for goodness sakes! The pseudo-title
of "untitled" just reinforces this on multiple levels.
This is elegant but rather an English-centric argument.
- As I said earlier, to some international users there won't be a
difference at all.
- And even in Roman scripts, some users might very well use lower
case to title their document names even when saved.
So trying to represent untitledness via lack of title-casing is not
always necessarily a clue and is not global. So we have proxy icons
to more exactly represent untitledness.
Also, no user I've talked to (and had talked to, even years ago) was
aware that the lower case in "untitled" was there to convey some
information. Now, this is information that is rather important, so
if it needs to be communicated, then it should be communicated in a
more explicit way, and not just for speakers whose languages use
alphabets with case variations.
There are other ways to do this:
- If the document is untitled, why have a title? Leave the title
blank. (Clearly a bit wacky and ugly)
- Make the title a different color, or font style, or use some other
indication which a titled document would never use. (Under
discussion with HI)
At this point use of "untitled" vs "Untitled" is more of an aesthetic
question, and (to bring the discussion back to Cocoa-land) NSDocument
uses a naming convention with capitalization familiar to users of
Adobe and Microsoft apps. By sticking with NSDocument's default
behavior, your apps will have leverage of any change that might
happen in the guidelines and frameworks. But if you want to use
"untitled," you are free to do so, since I believe the hooks exist in
NSDocument.
Ali
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