Too me, it would be more natural to have tags with an initial upper case letter than a lower case letter, but that isn’t the case (pun intended). I hear no reason to why that is, but colleagues keep telling me to only use lower case while creating tags. I wonder if it may have to do with the fact that the tag itself is not created as a controlled vocabulary, managed by an Information Architect at all times. Instead a tag is a kind of folksonomy, driven and managed by its users from the bottom up. But I have no clue… I’m only guessing. Do you know why tags first letter is lower case?
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Partly to do with the likely matching lower case of the word when found embedded in the relevant content. Partly to provide a consistent nature to the tags without seeming to give any one tag preferential treatment or any sense of importance that is not due. Partly to remove a layer of complication when creating, defining, exposing, using, sharing, translating, duplicating and implementing tags. And importantly, partly because the tag is not a noun or a description or phrase nor any language related element - it is just a tag - a handle by which to pivot data around. |
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Is "all lower-case" a rule? If you google "tag cloud images", you'll find all kinds of tags. Example from Wikipedia: The advantage I see for a pure lowercase situations, is that the tags could be used in a context where lowercase makes sense. Eg
as opposed to
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ba da cha Nice. Ben, this is a great point. Tags with an upper-case first letter would be more readable, according to usability research. 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jacob Nielsen talks about this. Just because they're input in lower-case doesn't mean we can't display them with the best convention. Input!=Output. I say convert the tags to have upper-case first letters. Great idea Ben. |
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