*> How does the importance of that compare to the trouble caused for screen readers etc.?*
Heh. It doesn't. =) Put simply, if you're searching for human text in prose, you'll almost always want a case-insensitive search. Amusing sidenote: A screen-reader would read ".Sh" as "Ssssh...", which would actually make ".Sh" ".It" pretty concerning. ;-) You can get around this by using <abbr>.Sh</abbr>; a title attribute needn't be included if all you care about is having it pronounced letter-by-letter. So <abbr title="Section heading">.Sh</abbr> isn't necessary. On Mon, 17 Dec 2018 at 07:56, Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: > Hi John, > > John Gardner wrote on Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 07:25:00AM +1100: > > Tadziu Hoffmann wrote: > > >> or perhaps it was considered but consciously rejected because > >> situations existed where it would be detrimental? > > > It could have been to make sections more conspicuous in text editors, > > Certainly not. The editor in v3 and v4 was ed(1). > Even ex(1) did not exist at the time. > > > making it easier for the author to spot sections when skimming a file. > > Doubt there was any syntax highlighting back then... =) > > Syntax highlighting six years before the invention of vi(1)? > That's indeed a funny idea! > > > Plus it's easier to search for a section name > > The more(1) command first appeared in 3.0BSD. > That is another year *after* vi(1). > > No, those can't possibly be the reasons. :-) > > I suspect that in 1973, developers consulted printed manuals rather > than reading them at the terminal, simply because the terminal was > a real line printing terminal and the machine didn't have a CRT > yet. Even the first two machines i practiced programming on only > had LED (not LCD!) single-line displays and didn't have CRTs yet. > > > if you know in advance it'll always be in uppercase, which I guess > > spares you the effort of remembering to do a case-sensitive search > > in vi or whatever... > > That may be worth considering today, though. How does the importance > of that compare to the trouble caused for screen readers etc.? > > I tend to think it is not that important even today, so the main > tradeoff remains (editing effort + overcoming people's inertia) > vs. (less trouble for screen readers + nicer typography). > > Yours, > Ingo >
