Re: Style guide feedback

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Tue, 2001-12-11 at 11:18, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 11:55:55AM -0500 or thereabouts, Trevor Curtis wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 08:47:03AM -0800, Darin Adler offered:
>>> I guess I'm just used to "menu bar" because that's the style we used at
>>> Apple, back before there were menu bars on most other computers. [snip]
 
>> ispell says this:
 
>> menubar
>> & menubar 33 0: menu bar, menu-bar, (then other totally unrelated
>> words)...

>> It does look weird to me, but I'm sure I look wierd to you... so it all
>> works out in the end. :)
 
>> What do the rest of ya think?

> I pondered suggesting hyphens, then decided not to because these
> days on the net they seem very much to be a British English thing.
> I have noticed they are rare in American English. If they look
> weird to you, perhaps they're rare in Canadian English too :)

> Also, I'm not at all clear that a hyphen is "correct" here. It's
> just something I would use, and my grammar is very far from 
> perfect. I can manage who/whom and shall/will (both of which
> are completely irrelevant today!) but my use of hyphens is 
> entirely guesswork :) 

It's worth noting that compound words like these usually shed the space
and the hyphen over time. It's what happened to email, and it's a common
linguistic development. So it seems to me that while Darin remembers
"menu bar" from back when there were no menu bars on any other
computers, "menubar" is probably a lot more acceptable now.

-- 
 Joakim Ziegler - Ximian Engineer - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
FIX sysop - Free Software Coder - Writer - FIDEL & Conglomerate hacker
          http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/