MDS050: proper-names

Configured proper names (e.g. JavaScript, GitHub) must appear with their canonical casing.

Teams that document software projects need consistent casing for product names: Javascript vs JavaScript, Github vs GitHub, markdown vs Markdown. MDS050 lets you pin a vocabulary of proper names and reports any occurrence whose casing does not match.

# Settings

names appends across config layers so a kind layer can extend the project vocabulary without replacing it. check-code and check-html replace.

# Config

Enable with a vocabulary:

rules:
  proper-names:
    names:
      - JavaScript
      - TypeScript
      - GitHub
      - mdsmith

Also check inside code blocks:

rules:
  proper-names:
    names:
      - JavaScript
    check-code: true

Disable:

rules:
  proper-names: false

# Detection

For each configured name, the rule scans prose text for ASCII-case-insensitive matches that start at a word boundary. Only ASCII letters (A–Z) are folded; non-ASCII characters in a configured name are matched byte-for-byte. A match must be preceded by a non-word character (not in [A-Za-z0-9_]) or occur at the start of the file. Only the left boundary is enforced — there is no right-boundary check. For example, Javascripts (wrong case) matches JavaScript at the left boundary; the rule reports and fixes the Javascripts prefix to JavaScript, leaving the trailing s unchanged. Correctly-cased prefixes in longer words (e.g. JavaScripts) are not flagged. When the matched bytes differ from the canonical spelling, a diagnostic is emitted.

URLs inside link destinations and autolinks are never checked.

# Fix

Each wrong-cased occurrence is replaced in place with the canonical spelling.

# Examples

# Bad – wrong casing in prose

# Wrong Casing

Javascript is a scripting language.

# Bad – wrong casing in heading

# Heading

## Github

Some text under the heading.

# Bad – wrong casing in link text (URL not checked)

# Links

[Github](https://github.com) is a code host.

# Good – correct casing

# Correct Casing

Use JavaScript for front-end code and GitHub for version control.

The mdsmith tool lints Markdown files.

# Good – word-boundary edge case

# Word Boundary

GitHubber contributors are welcome.

The word "GitHubber" contains "GitHub" with correct casing so no
diagnostic is emitted.

# Diagnostics

# Meta-Information

• ID: MDS050
• Name: proper-names
• Status: ready
• Default: disabled, opt-in
• Fixable: yes
• Implementation: source
• Category: prose
• markdownlint: MD044 (proper-names)
• rumdl: MD044 (proper-names)