ninjapostrophe

eliza, formerly of kotaku, now of wired, speaks out about the apostrophe and the ninja.

hrm, this raises a grammatical point, is there a style guide for punctuation as used in a hyperlink? if i’m ending a sentence with a link, i often leave the period outside the closing tag so that it is not part of the link, but the post. i find this to be more satisfying, giving a greater sense of finality. if the period is linking to something, it doesn’t feel like i’m really ending my sentence.

i also type in all lowercase which i’ve heard infuriates some people. i knew/know a guy online who posts as simply e and never used punctuation, except maybe for a stint when he was posting as hasbro’s ric olie action figure back in ‘99. in any case, the nocaps style appealed to me, and i got lazy about it and now i have trouble typing formally with proper capitalization. i’ve fallen out of the habit of using shift for anything other than running.

conversely, my handwriting is allcaps with infrequent punctuation, but i’ve developed a sort of bastard shorthand punctuation/flourish system which i often use to represent breaks in conversation or divisions between paragraphs, mostly because an ellipsis(…) is damned hard to write very quickly versus a flashy line.

i also invariably write at as @ in my notes, and usually replace without with w/o. i used to do that in posts on The Boards, but not so much anymore.