capitalization

1. as a matter of style, this website does not capitalize titles, the beginnings of sentences, or proper nouns.
2. i do capitalize A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.S., FOR EMPHASIS, and FoR mOcKeRy.
3. i may also capitalize names for which capitalization is a specific stylistic choice (i.e. iPhone, OCaml).
4. when referencing code, contextually appropriate capitalization is used.
5. any guest content will preserve the capitilization used by the original author.

why

capitalization is and has always been a stylistic choice, just like bold, italics, small caps and BlackLetter are stylistic choices. unlike punctuation marks, which annotate the stresses, pauses, and intonation that are a part of spoken english, capitalization has no equivalent in spoken english. however, capitalization does still impart some meaning on it's text. lets dig deeper.

in a title

title casing is purely stylistic. titles are already made clear in proportional-width typography by their larger size and different weight. in fact title casing is not remotley standardized, event today. here are some incompatible title casing styles:

the government of canada:

For all types of page titles and headings, as well as table captions and headers:

• capitalize the first letter of the first word (use sentence case)
• capitalize proper nouns
• don't add punctuation at the end

APA style:

In title case, major words are capitalized, and most minor words are lowercase. In sentence case, most major and minor words are lowercase (proper nouns are an exception in that they are always capitalized).

• major words: Nouns, verbs (including linking verbs), adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and all words of four letters or more are considered major words.
• minor words: Short (i.e., three letters or fewer) conjunctions, short prepositions, and all articles are considered minor words.

associated press (wikipedia linke because paywall):

• Capitalize words with three or more letters.
• Capitalize nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions.
• Lowercase articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions.

in my case, i've chosen an equally valid style: never capitalize the words in a title.

at the beginning of a sentence

i do conceed that capitalizing the first word of a sentence improves legibility by more clearly seperating sentences. however, i think making a new version of every character is way more of a hassle than just using a clearer period.

no capitals:

here's one sentence. notice how you can easily hop in at any point. each sentence is it's own thought, so feel free to skip the preceding ones.

capitals:

Here's one sentence. Notice how you can easily hop in at any point. Each sentence is it's own thought, so feel free to skip the preceding ones.

bullets:

here's one sentence • notice how you can easily hop in at any point • each sentence is it's own thought, so feel free to skip the preceding ones

vertical bars:

here's one sentence | notice how you can easily hop in at any point | each sentence is it's own thought, so feel free to skip the preceding ones

currently i think alternate sentence terminators/seperators are too jarring for most use cases. the loss of legibility is worth it, in exchange for not having to think about capitalizing every sentence.

proper nouns

the capitalization of proper nouns and their adjectival forms might seem to be a useful non-stylistic application of capitalization. there are certainly perculiarities and expections to this (like capitalizing the pronoun 'I'). but i'm not going to argue about those.

1. as mentioned before, we don't seem to need to mark proper nouns in spoken language.
2. the line between proper and improper nouns is blurry. proper nouns must be particular but they don't have to be unique or even singular (like "January" or "Americans"). but for some reason concepts and classes do not get this treatment. you would not write "the Bicycle". but what about the definite article? you still capitalize proper names that for whatever reason have a definite article like "the Hague" or "the Moon".
3. we only really decided on the proper noun thing around the turn of the 19th century¹. before that we capatalized all nouns or even words that just seemed important.
4. if it was really so important to mark proper nouns, we could adopt a proper article like the Māori "a". or we could simple make more use of the definite article we already have, or our demonstrative "this" ("the america", "this january", etc.). or we could adopt punctuation to denote propriety ("@america", "@january"). on the web specifically you can use hyperlinks to mark someting as a proper noun ("peter", "america", "january")

the plain text problem

style is one thing. there are obviously still diffrent letter variants, different fonts and all that. but now we have one special snowflake character style that gets to exist in ascii, and we can send it in texts and write it in programs. we are forever cursed to have either two keys with ostensibley the same content be unequal, or compare case-insensitively forever, and live with the knowledge that you can write a unique key in thousands of ways. to me this is the biggest harm of capitalization. one that our typographical anscestors could not have predicted.

conclusion

capital letters: i ain't using 'em. come back next time, where i will calculate the cumulative economic loss that humanity has suffered due to the creation and use of capital letters.