>> What sort of content is in your field of type text? Certainly, in English
>> prose, “rob” is different than “Rob”
>
> I disagree. While the grammar for written English has rules when to
> write "rob" and when to write "Rob", that distinction usually carries no
> semantic difference. Consider:
>
> "How to Rob the Hump of a Camel"
>
> "the go programming language was invented by rob pike, ken thompson and
> robert griesemer"
>
> Here "Rob" is a verb and "rob" is a first name, the opposite of what you
> probably intended. Yet the the first sentence is grammatically correct
> if it is a title and while the second isn't correct, few people will
> have difficulties understanding it (many probably won't even notice that
> it is all lower case).
>
> Spoken English of course doesn't even have a case distinction.
>
>> and if the content is for a web page (or in my experience, the content
>> of medical reference books) these differences are critical.
>
> A web page? Rarely, at least for the human readable parts. Medicine? I
> don't know. There may be names for different substances which differ
> only in case. But those are parts of a formal language, and as
> programmers we already know about case-sensitive formal languages.
>
I don’t think it’s solely about the semantics. One might be contractually
obligated to always spell a name in some exact way including it capitalization.
For instance if referring to "Rob Sargent” as a quote or accreditation, then
it’s not okay to let a typo “rob Sargent” go through.
