Unimportant egocentric rant: don’t .ToUpper() your titles

Here’s a minor inconvenience that I’m going to put out there in the hope that one or two of the horrible people responsible for it may realize the errors of their ways and make the world a marginally better place.

So you like your titles to be all caps. Fine. I’m not sure why you insist on screaming like that, but that’s your choice, and it’s your web site/blog. If you are going to do this, however, please don’t do this:

@post.Title.ToUpper()

And not just because you neglected to specify a culture (you monster). No, this is wrong because next time the guy who builds the week in .NET wants to mention your site and copies the title over, he’s going to copy this:

HOW TO USE ENTITY FRAMEWORK TO KILL PUPPIES!!!

instead of this:

How to use Entity Framework to make a rainbow

He’s going to curse loudly, his kids may hear him, and they’ll grow up to become as obnoxious as he is, all because of you. Well done.

This is particularly infuriating because there is a perfectly good way to do this bad thing that you insist on doing. In your CSS, just do something like this:

h1 { text-transform: uppercase; }

There. Was that so hard?

Except that no. When you copy text that has been styled this way, you’ll still get the all caps text instead of the unstyled underlying text. F@$#!

OK.

Fine.

Just don’t .ToUpper your titles. Please. It looks like crap and it’s less readable. And you sound like a Facebook comment from that uncle who ruins Thanksgiving every year.