this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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i am on a phone. i did not press any extra keys to make my phone not do caps - this is because i have changed my phone to this, because when you write about technical things, capitalisation is important - lower case everything is lower case everything. i’m not about to start hitting an extra key at random times when this is perfectly fine. i’ve never had an issue reading all lower case
it’s not try-hard; it’s practical for people who work with tech
Don't you find capitalisation help to define sentences? It's much easier to read, particularly at speed.
personally, no i don’t. perhaps it’s because i skim a lot of code and im just used to it? i’m not sure, but honest truth i find capitals mostly redundant. perhaps useful to add context (names, acronyms, etc)… i add them for uncommon acronyms, but common things that people know i tend to skip too
you can say it’s lazy, and i’ll absolutely take that: it’s totally lazy… but there’s no weird effort or external image decision involved in it?
It's just an extra convention to help communication. But I don't buy your lazy argument because:-
and
Both of the reasons you’ve provided are nonsensical:
It is irrelevant that they don’t believe capitalization aids with clarity.
Communication is about what other people prefer, not what you personally like. And they obviously do want to communicate well
If a communication norm is just about other people’s preferences, why should they change? Who’s to say that other people’s preferences are more important than their own, particularly given that this particular preference is shared by millions of other people.
If inconsistent use of capitalization actually hinders understanding for some subset of their audience, then that’s a different story. My experience is that people are more likely to be annoyed than to actually have issues understanding all lowercase text. All caps text, on the other hand, is a different matter - and plenty of government and corporate entities are fine putting important text in all caps. But all caps text is a known accessibility issue. When I search for “all lowercase accessibility,” though, all I get is a bunch of results saying to not use all caps text for accessibility reasons.
If you have sources showing that all lowercase text is an accessibility concern, then you should share them. Heck, you should have led with that. But as it is, your argument ultimately boils down to “someone else should change what they do, that works for them, because it annoys me.”