Headers

All caps?

[Birdman]

Hello,

I'm currently working on a client's site and the content given to me has all headers in upercase lettering and I am used to only capitalizing the first letter of words in headers, except for and, to, a and other operator type words.

My question is, what is the proper way and should I alter the client's text to conform if the proper way is to NOT use all caps?

[IanTurner]

If the copy was supplied with Full Cap Headers I would leave them - (I think there maybe an SEO benefit for doing so too)

[tbear]

Don't know if there is any SEO benefit (caps vs lower case, doubt it) but as far as readability is concerned 'all caps' is decidedly unreadable.
Most people recognise words and phrases, written and capitalised normally, almost automatically. Words and phrases written in caps require that we slow right down and go from letter to letter (also automatically) in order to read them.
I remember a few years ago in chat rooms those messages in caps seemed to fly past without fully getting read, whereas those written normally seemed to be understood with just a glance.
Some 4 or 5 years ago I read some study papers on the web that explained this phenomenon, but pleeeez don't ask me to remember where, LOL.
As a side note, it was also pointed out that if you obscure the top half of a line of text (all caps or normal) it would be very difficult to read but if you obscure the bottom half of the same text the normal text is normally quite readable but the all caps not..... interesting, eh¿
Wish I could remember where I found these jewels.....

[grahamstewart]

Why not use CSS to capitalise them?

e.g. in html you have..

<h1>A Very Important Header</h1>
<h2>Slightly less important header</h2>

and then in your CSS you do..

h1, h2 {
text-transform: uppercase;
}

Alternatively you could specify

capitalize

which does first letter caps if you want to do this the other way round and keep the caps for search engines to see.

[Birdman]

Thanks for the replies. Looks like it's still up in the air. Graham, that solution is great. I can make my mind up later and not have to redo the <h>s manually.