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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Inconsistent use of case in acronyms
From:       Vedran =?utf-8?q?Ljubovi=C4=87?= <vedran-liste () smartnet ! ba>
Date:       2004-08-28 19:13:24
Message-ID: 200408282113.24453.vedran-liste () smartnet ! ba
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Hello,

I see some discussion with regards to quality, and since now is the Good Time 
(post release) I'd like to discuss how acronyms are given in KDE GUI strings 
and docs.

The proper way to write acronyms in English (and most other languages that I 
know of) is in all upper case, like this: SMTP

However, it seems that some people think that all upper case text looks 
"scary" and so they write their acronyms in sentence case then it somehow 
looks "less scary". The problem is, sometimes the new word has an entirely 
different meaning, for example MIME (short for Multipurpose Internet Mail 
Extensions) is *not* mime - which has its own meaning in English. Even worse, 
sometimes completely new words are coined, like "mimetype".


Well, (to developers) if you have so many acronyms in your GUI perhaps you 
should consider rephraseing. For example, instead of "MIME type" you might 
want to say "file type", or "document type" or just "type". Most users 
wouldn't know what MIME is even if it was relevant - and usually it isn't.

If we agree upon this I think it wouldn't be very hard to grep the sources for 
mime and mimetype, I think I've found a 100 or so instances of this usage 
alone in the GUI files. Just don't expect me to file a 100 reports with 
Bugzilla :) "grep MIME" returns less matches then "grep mimetype".

Another situation comes when there's a console command to do something that 
happens to be an acronym or a program name. So, for example, CVS stands for 
Concurrent Versioning System, but in context of actions a developer will 
usually write "cvs" to be consistent with the console. What's the purpose of 
stating console commands in a GUI? Then just use the console, right? 
Or, a menu option might say "mutt", but I would prefer "Mutt" cause it's a 
program name afterall and not an English word which again is a source of 
potential confusion and blahblah.


So please write your comments and suggestions for improvements.
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