Re: FAQ headings - title or sentence case ?

["Stuart Burnfield" <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

Here's a vote for sentence case.

There are two main arguments for making it title case:

- FAQ questions need additional formatting to make them easy to
distinguish from answers.

There are many other formatting options that do this job better.
Output the question in bold or a different font. Make the question
flush left and indent the answer.

- FAQ questions are a type of heading. Other headings are in title
case. Therefore, for the sake of consistency, FAQ questions should be
too.

In my opinion an FAQ document is its own unique type of topic with its
own structure. For convenience you could choose to mark up an FAQ
question using the same tag or paragraph style that you would use for
a subheading in a 'concept' or 'reference' topic. But why not think of
questions and answers as specialized information units, and create
special FAQ-question and FAQ-answer tags or paragraph styles to
implement them? Seen this way, there's no particular reason why a
'question' should have to be consistent with a 'heading'. You could
equally argue that an FAQ is a list of questions and answers,
therefore it should be in sentence case to be consistent with all the
other lists.

--- Stuart

Monique wrote:

Just wondering whether to use title or sentence case for FAQ headings?
In this case, itÃs for an entire doc of FAQs, not a section/chapter
within a doc.

For example, ÃHow much memory does  require?Ã vs. ÃHow Much Memory
Does  Require?Ã

Sentence case is much more natural for this sort of thing, and easier
to read. But itÃs inconsistent with the usage in the rest of the doc
set. But because this doc is nothing but a list of FAQs, all the
headings are for a question, so no inconsistency within the doc.

I could reword the headings to be facts vs. the question, but I like
the question format, especially for a doc devoted to FAQs.

Thoughts?

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