Re: [PATCH] documentation: send-email: use camel case consistently

From: Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org>
Date: Feb 20, 2024, 16:50 UTC
Message-ID: <a766ba7eb27f663eee34214714f6076d@manjaro.org>
In-Reply-To: <9d0022ba5666223af94bbf450909b1ba@manjaro.org>

On 2024-02-20 17:29, Dragan Simic wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On 2024-02-20 17:22, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org> writes:
>> 
>>> Though, "CC" should remain written as "Cc", because it's the way 
>>> email
>>> headers are capitalized, which "Cc" refers to.
>> 
>> E-mail headers are case insensitive, though.  See above ;-).
> 
> I've never ever seen anyone referring to email headers as "TO", "CC" or
> "BCC".  It's always referred to as "To", "Cc" and "Bcc".
> 
> Moreover, RFC2076 [1] refers to them as "To", "cc" and "bcc".  This
> makes it debatable whether "Cc" and "Bcc" are formally the right forms
> to use in regular conversations, but also makes it clear they aren't
> to be treated as abbreviations.
> 
> [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2076

Here are a few more interesting links:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_copy
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212059
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50826

Thus, "cc" stems from the old age of literal carbon copies, and "bcc" was seemingly coined when email took over. Technically, "CC" and "BCC" (or "cc" and "bcc") _are_ abbreviations, but the slightly incorrect "Cc" and "Bcc" forms simply became widespread and took over.

If you insist on using "CC", I'd be fine with that, but frankly, I think that would actually be confusing to the users.