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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Inconsistent use of case in acronyms
From:       Federico Zenith <zenith () chemeng ! ntnu ! no>
Date:       2004-08-29 5:39:48
Message-ID: 200408290739.52506.zenith () chemeng ! ntnu ! no
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Alle 21:13, sabato 28 agosto 2004, Vedran Ljubović ha scritto:
> 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".

100% agree.

> 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.

And that's another important point - I got to the point where I understood 
that "MIME" types are file types, but I did not know the acronyme. I think 
there should be a general policy of filtering out "MIME", except of course 
where it's appropriate (undoubtedly only a small fraction of the ~100 
occurrences you report).

Cheers,
-Federico

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