In the Internet world writing something in all caps is seen as the cyber-equivalent of yelling . . . vocally . . . out loud, basically rude “netiquette” (haven’t seen that term in a while). While I agree with that general sentiment I feel that there are situations where I wish people would just yell a little.

What I’m getting at is when mentioning X/HTML elements in articles and when referring to them within CSS documents I wish web developers would put them in capital letters.

It is true that within an XHTML document itself tags should be in lowercase but outside of an XHTML document there is no such requirement. The only exception is if your XHTML is being served as XML, in which case the elements in your XHTML document and their respective elements in the CSS must be exactly matched, but since XHTML is hardly ever served as XML that is only a rare case.

I understand that some people may just like the style of always putting XHTML tags in lowercase letters, but sometimes I get the distinct feeling people think the XHTML police will be after them if they ever show an XHTML tag in uppercase letters.

Why?

Why do I feel that way? It’s because it greatly increases readability. Consider the following example from a style sheet I am currently working on. If I write everything in lowercase as follows:

1. #header ul li a:link
2. {
3. color: #FFFFFF;
4. text-decoration: none;
5. }

then when I glance at it I have to take a few extra moments to figure out which parts of it are referring to X/HTML elements. But if I type the rule as follows:

1. #header UL LI A:link
2. {
3. color: #FFFFFF;
4. text-decoration: none;
5. }

it is much easier to read. The difference is even greater when I look at a style sheet somebody else has created.

What about in an article?

It seems to also be popular to put X/HTML tags in lowercase when simply mentioning them in a web development article. For example, in this excellent article on CSS Stacked Bar Graphs at The Wojo Group site, the following appears:

Next, we hide the dt tags.

But its readability is greatly improved if it were to appear as follows:

Next, we hide the DT tags.

Of course, its readability would go up even more if the tags were highlighted in some way or otherwise made to stand out, like so:

Next, we hide the DT tags.

But even just putting them in uppercase letters helps a lot, and it should be emphasized that it in no way violates any rule of web development.

UPDATE: I just stumbled across a different type of example where seeing an X/HTML element written in uppercase would’ve greatly improved readability. Actually, it’s really another reason why it would help for people to do that when writing style sheets.

I am working on the style sheet for this very blog and I found in it some places that said .cite and some that said cite. One is a class name and one is referring to the CITE element. If the element had been written in uppercase I would’ve been able to distinguish the two much quicker.