openSUSE:WebYaST Style Guide/Text

WebYaST

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Text Style Guide

General

• Keep the text short and meaningful.

Capitalization

Use title style for titles (e.g. headings, module titles) and sentence style for all other UI elements:

• Sentence stlye: first letter of the sentence is capitalized, all others lower case (with the exceptions of proper nouns and acronyms)
• Title style: the first letter of each word is capitalized, the rest are lower case. In some cases short articles, prepositions, and conjunctions are not capitalized unless they are the first word in the title. E.g.
  • Articles (a, an, the)
  • Coordinate conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or)
  • Prepositions of four or fewer letters

When capitalizing, do not change the capitalization of filenames, configuration variables, and similar casesensitive items. These should be presented in the case required by the system to avoid confusion.

Punctuation

Do not use spaces before commas (,), periods (.), colons (:), or semicolons (;). Avoid using exclamation marks at all. The wording and the type of message provide the needed emphasis. Avoid using punctuation dashes, called em dashes. If it cannot be avoided, use . Only use / if it is part of a standard term, such as TCP/IP. Usually or or and should be used where a / is used.

Spelling

Use American English as the original language for all texts. Many words have multiple "acceptable" spellings, but it has been necessary for SuSE and Novell to standardize on certain variants for consistency. Use the first variant in Webster's dictionary as the standard spelling for anything not on these lists.

3D backend back up (verb) backup (noun) boot disk boot loader cannot casesensitive, caseinsensitive certificate authority client/server command line email filename file system frontend

GNOME hard disk hostname hotplug, hotplugging, hotpluggable Internet intranet journaling KDE local host (normal), localhost (default name of the local host) log file log in (verb), login (noun) log out (verb), logout(noun) mount point pathname RAM disk

reconfigure recreate runlevel runtime set up (verb), setup (noun) standalone startup SSH uninstall username Web Web page Web server X Window System (do not shorten to X Windows)

Module Title

Use title style for the module title.
Keep the title short and meaningful.
The module title is consistent with the module title in „Show all“ or "Home" page.
Do not use "Configure" or any other verb in the title.
If the module is used to configure a client, use the word "Client" in the title.
If the module is used to configure a server, use the word "Server" in the title.