i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Hey, I'm just passing along something linked from DaringFireball.net. Blame Gruber (generally a good strategy, regardless).

Caleb Crain in the NYT writes "Against Camel Case", an essay down on our prof's favorite formatting trick. However, I'm not sure what Crain uses as examples are really camel case... we used to call it "intercapitalization" or "intercaps" back in my dead-tree journalism days. The worst example, in my memory, was a product called "HoTMetaLPro" (see the HTML in there?). Drove copy editors nuts. Quick: is it "Quark XPress", "QuarkXPress", "Quark xPress", "QuarkxPress", or what?

In camel case's defense: it is used in code, and hews to strict rules, so the geeks -- I mean, elite engineers -- who are exposed to it know how to read it. These rules may be arbitrary within a particular domain (workgroup, project), but they're still there. Don't think any would allow an abomination as shown above.

Waaaaitaminute... iSchool?