Capitalization

Purpose

Capitalization is a feature of case-sensitive languages to foster relevance by drawing attention to words with capital letters. For a consistent look and feel of the software, it is important to implement capitalization consistently.

Guidelines

There are two types of capitalization, title capitalization and sentence style capitalization:

Title Capitalization

Title capitalization is when every word in a sentence, statement, phrase, or label is capitalized except for certain words. Use title capitalization primarily for titles and headers, but also for command labels. For example:

• Titles and headers on windows, dialog boxes, tabs, lists, group boxes, tree views, etc.

• Menu titles and menu item labels

• Button labels

Don’t capitalize:

• Articles: a, an, the

• Coordinating conjunctions: and, but, or, for, nor, etc.

• Prepositions (fewer than five letters): on, at, to, from, by, etc.

Capitalize everything else.

Sentence Style Capitalization

Sentence style capitalization is when the first letter of the sentence, statement, phrase, or label is capitalized and all other words are lower case. The only exception to this is proper nouns which are always capitalized.

Use sentence style capitalization for text that is or could be read as a sentence, or that is part of a sentence in conjunction with other elements. For example:

• Tooltip text

• Placeholder text in text fields

• Checkbox labels

• Labels to the left of controls in a Form Layout

• Descriptions of anything

Acronyms/Initialisms, Internet

• Words such as URL, JPEG, or LDAP should be written in capital letters

• Internet (if referring to the Internet) takes a capital I.