[uf-discuss] lower-case instead of camelCase

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 10/28/05 1:17 PM, "Ryan King" <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:

>> 
>>     Is word-word the preferred format for classes in microformats?
>> Personally, I usually use camelCase, but if there's already a
>> convention, we'll stick to that.
> 
> I think many of use have found that using all lower case works much
> better on the web, so its become a rule-of-thumb for developing
> microformats (maybe this needs to be on the wiki somewhere?).

The http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing page touches on this, and
refers to a couple of other resources that explain more.

I agree that this merits addition to the wiki in a more
obvious/discoverable/referencable place.

We use lower-case names, properties etc. in microformats themselves *and* in
the wiki page names as well.

Some of the thoughts behind this:

Frankly: camelCase is a programmer idiom that is not very user friendly to
"typical useres".   dashed lower case is much easier to read.

Case sensitivity.  mixedCase is a problem for the reasons Pilgrim mentions
and more.

Search engine indexing.  dashed-lower-case file names are better indexed by
search engines than camelCase names which are currently NOT broken up in to
separate words by indexers.  Frankly, the use of CamelCase for wiki pages
probably made the wrong compromise between findability and authorability.

Again, these are just thoughts, and probably deserve further exploration,
but there you have some of the raw reasoning behind it.

Thanks,

Tantek