: not a blog

28 jan 07

How does somebody with a self-professed sickness for obsessively fixing style and grammar and holds vanilla HTML up to XhTMl capitalization standards justify writing everything in lower-case.

How can someone who admittedly suffers from the sickness of obsessively fixing style and grammar, and who holds vanilla HTML up to XhTMl capitalization standards, justify writing everything in lower-case?

because writing everything in lower-case is a manifestation of the same meticulous behavior that's responsible for obsessively fixing style and grammar (otherwise known as "working at good writing"), as well as the holding of vanilla HTML up to XhTMl capitalization standards (i don't, really; i was only annoying and/or amusing the submitter when i mentioned it).

ie, i'm lower-casing with purpose, and not out of carelessness. in fact, i remember more than one occasion when i've gone back and stripped all of the capitalization out of a paragraph for inclusion in a blog entry.

it's a conscious style-choice, and one that i occasionally struggle with. i don't remember why i started doing it -- perhaps because it seemed to me to be more bloggish, or possibly as some misguided symbolic flouting of authority. but i do specifically remember thinking something like "how should i handle the capitalization here? i think i'll do it in all lower-case".

whether or not to capitalize has weighed on my mind for a long time. when i was in school, i developed a capitalization algorithm, because i was dissatisfied with the one available to me. i believe it was as simple as "only capitalize the beginnings of sentences, because every other capitalization is a value-judgement of sorts". if i capitalize "George", then there's an implication that "george" is important. no-one but me is allowed to say whether or not george is important.

now, i realize that capitalization is such an accepted style-convention that failing to capitalize, say, proper names (let alone the first word in a sentence) is just as odd as picking your own private method of spelling.

sure, it's a unique style that might be considered part of the artistry, but the primary purpose of writing (as far as i'm concerned) isn't to put it down in calligraphy, but rather to communicate a message. that said, i should probably try to switch back to a more normal format, but it's difficult to change behavior, and, frankly, it's easier not to capitalize. but it's important to remember (at least in the inane context of this question) that it was originally a conscious decision indicative of too much thought going into presentation and form.

i'll mention as an arguably-related aside that old and middle english weren't capitalized at all, and that lack of consensus on proper capitalization endures.

my using all lower-case annoys some people, and it does make my blog more difficult to read. I've thought about abandoning the practice from time to time, and once even managed to get myself in the habit of properly capitalizing for a short while, but fell out of it after a few days. And I always have, at the back of my head, the fear that the tiny spark of consciousness I need to light in order to make some letters upper-case is going to somehow affect my writing; I've been writing this way for so long now that I wonder if it's part of the whole of my creative process, and can't be safely lifted out.

Your question implies that my failure to capitalize is a result of carelessness that isn't consistent with the carefullness of my editing (again, i don't actually care about html standards -- if a modern graphical browser displays code as the author intended, then it's "standards-compliant" enough for me).

you, unnamed smirking internet imp at SDF, gleefully state that i can't really be careful in principle, because i demonstrably am not in some areas. On the contrary -- my failure to capitalize is the result of too much care, in a sense -- it's a style decision that I perhaps should not have made, but that I now feel might be too late to reverse.

people like to point out inconsistencies; a lot of perceived textual victories amount to "i have demonstrated that you are inconsistent in your behavior -- you aren't following your own rules".

i'm inconsistent -- i'll contradict myself, change my mind, and do things i criticize other people for doing. normally, if faced with a "you are inconsistent!" attack, i'd answer with "yeah. so?" (or, in this case, "i don't justify it; i do it"). but, the point the submitter tried to make happened to be invalid, so that served to beef up this essay a bit.

"vanilla html". teehee. maybe i'll re-do every one of my pages in AJAX so that only a paragraph at a time loads. have you seen the new yahoo tv guide? they re-did it in AJAX in this very same way, totally unneccessarily, and in flagrant over-eagerness to fall, slobbering, all over new technologies, like a cowpoke on a whore. i've seen other instances of AJAX when it's not needed, but i can't remember specifics. really, the only places i've seen it used well are in google maps and gmail.

WANTED!!!
AJAX PROGRAMMERS!!!!
FOR ANYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!
IT DOESN'T MATTER!!!!!!
APPLY WITHIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!