At 11/5/03 6:02 PM, Mark E. Mallett wrote: >> 1. In the line "ICANN, the organization responsible for the stable >> operation of the Domain Name System...", "Domain Name System" should not >> be capitalized. > >I would capitalize it, as it's a proper name for a specific thing. >It's "The Domain Name System" as opposed to "a domain name system."
Well, I'd certainly agree about capitalizing proper nouns; I still capitalize Internet and Web, both of which are a losing battle, I fear. I don't think "domain name system" (or its acronym "DNS") is a proper noun, though, is it? You rarely see people say "the Domain Name System" or "the DNS" in the same way they refer to "the Web" or "the Internet". If "the DNS" is common usage in phrases like "my server is part of the DNS" or "my server sent a query to the DNS", then you're quite right; it is a proper noun and should be capitalized. That kind of usage seems rare-to-nonexistent to me, though. Hmmmm. (The phrase "DNS" is correctly always capitalized because it's an acronym, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be capitalized when written out in full.) >> 2. At the end of that sentence, there are two spaces instead of one >> between "registration. Please". > >Supposed to be two spaces between the end of a sentence and the >start of the next. Looks proper to me. Some people do use two spaces, mostly because they were taught to do so in typewriter classes for typewriter-specific reasons. I guess you could make an argument that e-mail also tends to be read in monospaced fonts, and therefore should be subject to the same rules as typewriters... but even if you buy that argument, the vast majority of people use only a single space in e-mail, which means that an extra space would look odd compared to the rest of the message a reseller supplies. And things that look odd look like typos, which is bad. (Style guides also say that two spaces is wrong, but they're assuming you're going to be using proportional fonts, so I'll concede they might not be particularly relevant in this case.) Anyhoo, based on other messages, the number of spaces between sentences appears to be something people feel strongly about, and it's the most minor complaint I had. I hereby withdraw my objection to that if OpenSRS will fix at least items 3 and 4 of my original list :-) -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/
