"an URL" used in docs repeatedly

[connorshea]

"an URL" is grammatically incorrect, as "URL" is pronounced "you-are-el". "An" should only be used when the first sound of the next word begins with a vowel sound, rather than a consonant sound.

This issue is present a few times in schema.rdfa, specifically at Line 4591, Line 4563, and Line 10581.

Sources for the grammar rule:

• American Psychological Association Style Guide
• Chicago Manual of Style
• English Stack Exchange

[chaals]

Actually a lot of people pronounce it "earl". In the absence of a Royal Academy of English Pronunciation, or a Presidential Commission, or an official by-law of the municipality of Booroondara that is recognised as authority, I think we shouldn't be overly concerned.

That said, consistency isn't inherently bad, and if we decide to "bikeshed" this issue to resolution I'd vote for "a URL" because I say it that way.

[danbri]

Thanks for your attention to detail, @connorshea. I agree it would be good to be consistent on this, one way or another. This explains why it's "a unicorn" not "an unicorn", which I have wondered about occasionally; I'd heard the rule was letter-based rather than sound-based. As @chaals says, English is not pronounced very consistently so I don't think we can be super strict about these things. But converging on "a URL" sounds reasonable.

(wonder if @timbl has a view?)

[danbri]

I'm assigning this issue to @shankarnat as he's looking for easy issues while learning our tooling/workflow.

[shankarnat]

I have made changes and created a pull request to merge the change. @danbri can you please review ? Thanks!

[danbri]

Thanks :) although I don't see it inhttps://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/pulls yet. But I am looking via phone, will double check when back on a laptop.

[unor]

→ #500

[danbri]

Great. LGTM :)

[shankarnat]

Closing this issue now! Thanks.