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Really, it's the third, 🍎

Allow lowercase letters in table headers

It seems that table headers will always appear with uppercase letters, even if the Markdown has them as lowercase letters. This seems to be part of the styling for table headers: there's a text-transform: uppercase there.

I understand that stylistically, uppercase headers look better, and it serves to better signify that it's a header instead of just a normal cell. However, please provide an option to disable capitalization in table headers.

In some cases, the casing of what's in the table actually matters to the content of the post. Example below:

User group Preference of style "HoTMaiL" Preference of style "Hotmail"
Former users 72% 23%
New users 19% 63%

If you click to edit the post, you'll see that the second heading actually has the text "HoTMaiL", while the third one says "Hotmail". However, they look exactly the same in the table headers. (For context, the first style was used by the site's initial founders to indicate that the site offered the first HTML-based email client - the letters "HTML" were capitalized.)

This also may violate rules of style in certain style handbooks, which state that some letters should be lowercase even if using all caps otherwise. As an example, in at least one style book, the names "McDonald" and "LaSalle" should be written as McDONALD or LaSALLE in all caps. But this styling doesn't allow for that. Example:

Prefers McDonald's Prefers Burger King
72% 23%
19% 63%

Finally, the all-uppercase styling can introduce quirks with characters that display differently in uppercase than in lowercase. For example, the long S character ſ's uppercase form is "S", and so tables that have that character will confusingly show the letter "S" instead of the long S character ſ. Example below:

Years Incidence of ſ in books
1700-1800 64%

While these instances can be worked around with code formatting, as after this answer was completed, code in table headers is no longer uppercased, the general etiquette on sites is to only use code formatting on things that are actually code, and this will go against that.

Can there please be some way to write lowercase letters in table headers, even if the preferred style is to have them all caps?