NWN SURVEY: To capitalize or NOT TO CAPITALIZE?

Readers, help me out. Occasionally I get complaints about CAPITALIZING ALL MY POST HEADLINES, especially from some RSS users, who find it jarring.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Readers, help me out.  Occasionally I get complaints about CAPITALIZING ALL MY POST HEADLINES, especially from some RSS users, who find it jarring.  On the other side, that's been this blog's format style even when it was a Linden-sponsored site, and since then, I've discovered it makes NWN posts stand out more in Google searches.  However, I defer to the majority of my readers-- please let me know if you care one way or the other.  Survey runs for the next two weeks!

Comments

[rikomatic]

As I say on almost a daily basis to newbies, "ALL CAPS MEANS SHOUTING." NWN is too great to have to be shouted.

[Tao Takashi]

and as we are at RSS, why not include the full body into the RSS feed ;-)

Right now I hardly read NWN I must say except in headline.

[Gleeb Gupte]

You forgot the fourth option, 'Small Caps', a style available via CSS that makes every letter a capital, although letters not typed as capitals will be the same height as a non-conital letter.

I think that'd be a happy compromise.

[Mr Oh]

The question of using caps in titles is not something that can be decided on its own but goes hand in hand with another policy decision: if you can make a policy of using short titles, then you can make good use of all caps. If your titles are going to continue to be more like sentences then you've got to use upper- and lower-case.

Thus you could have:

ALL-CAPS OR NOT?
as a quite respectible title. Caps are harder to read, but it's so short you're taking it in at a glance rather than reading, and the look of the caps sets the article apart.

But you probably shouldn't have:

NWN SURVEY: TO CAPITALIZE OR NOT TO CAPITALIZE?
Because this one is longer, with longer words and an acronym, you actually need to read it, and the all-caps interferes with actual reading.

(ps. in reply to Gleep Gupte's suggestion, fake small caps (made by using a smaller type size for the 'lower case' letters are an abomination -- the letter strokes often wind up a different thickness so that they don't belong. A line of fake small caps texts looks uneven in darkness and ugly as a result. True small caps will come as a separate typeface and are carefully designed so that while the height of the letter is shorter, the stroke width is the same, so a line of that looks more even and regular.)

[Cyn Vandeverre]

You've got good content. Don't be seduced by the steroid effect of all caps.