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The capitalisation of tooltips on question pages is quite inconsistent.

Looking, for instance, at the featured Meta Stack Overflow question "Take the 2019 Developer Survey", many inconsistencies can be seen in tooltip capitalisation in the UI:

1. Places that have tooltips that start with uppercase characters:

  • To the left of questions:

    To the left of questions

  • To the left of comments:

    To the left of comments

  • For the answer sort order links:

    For the answer sort order links

2. Places that have tooltips that start with lowercase characters:

  • At the bottom of a post:

    At the bottom of a post

  • To denote edited comments:

    To denote edited comments

  • For a user's reputation:

    For a user's reputation

  • For page N links:

    For page *N* links

3. A place that has a mix of tooltips that start with and lowercase and uppercase characters:

  • At the bottom of chains of comments:

    At the bottom of chains of comments

Even if the justification for the lowercase tooltips for the share/edit/close/flag links start with lowercase characters is that the links themselves are in lowercase, the answer sort order links are also in lowercase but the tooltips are in uppercase.

Could this be changed? It seems quite... inconsistent.

I've had a look in the User Experience Stack Exchange and couldn't find any questions which relate specifically to tooltip capitalisation, but I imagine that any such question would specify that the system be consistent.

Related:

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    I'm never going to be unable to see this now... the final picture has a full stop at the end of "questions in comments" as well when none of the other tooltips do :-(
    – ben is uǝq backwards
    Feb 11, 2019 at 18:03
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    @benisuǝqbackwards - In the case of the last image, it does make sense for the tooltip for "add a comment" to end with a full stop because it is two sentences. It'd be weird to have a sentence following another sentence but only the first to be terminated with a full stop. I am ending this sentence without a full stop - see how horrible it is
    – Wai Ha Lee
    Feb 11, 2019 at 20:47

1 Answer 1

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Yep, our capitalization is all over the place. The tricky part is our localization strings for other communities are based on the original English text. This means that if we change "share" to "Share", our translated communities (Russian, Japanese, Spanish, etc.) each have to re-translate.

We'll be making things more consistent as we refactor and modify existing layouts, but that's the interesting technical constraint we're up against.

As to how we intend to capitalize things consistently, that's laid out in our design system called Stacks. https://stackoverflow.design/content/grammar-and-mechanics#use-sentence-casing

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    We can appreciate that it's hard but you're still rolling it out before it's done! Just hold back the new wordings until they have been completed and are consistent. These are new widgets (e.g. Edit/Delete in comments) that do not match the same words found directly above them (e.g. in the question/answer to which comments are attached) - why not use the exact same text?
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Feb 12, 2019 at 0:02

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