ah. the "slippery slope" argument. doesn't work, as far as i'm concerned. there are all sorts of decisions in life where you have to make a judgement based on common sense and "fuzzy logic" rather than on a simple, clearly definable cutoff point. if you tried applying the slippery slope argument to any of those decisions, you'd end up having to create hard-line cutoff points that would look rediculous and would be unnessarialy constraining. you just can't go around in life saying "well, if you can do ___, why not ___ as well, and while we're at it, ____ ...?" all the time.
there are specific arguments, however, for dropping capital letters but not going all the way over to chatspeak. for one thing, as you yourself said, far more people can deal with dropped caps than with super chatspeak shortcuts like "u" and "l8r" and "4get." they also take longer for most people to process (which may well be the reason they aren't so well tolerated). you have to stop and think "4get... that would be four-get... oh, forget!"
with dropped caps, however, there's no additional processing. you see the word the same as always, just with a lowercase letter in front.
you also save far more keystrokes. i save at least one keystroke per sentence (quite a bit per post, considering my rather verbose style
). with chatspeak, you save more keystrokes at a time, but you can only use shorthand for certain words. you could drop words, i suppose, but again, that interferes with reader comprehension.
so, i once again propose dropped caps as the sensible stopping point. more efficient, more casual, just as easy to read. i could start talking about carpal tunnel syndrome and keyboard wear, but i think that's going a bit far.
anyway, that's my little speech on the subject. we now return you to your regularly scheduled donut/doughnut thread.
(sorry to hijack it, laura, but i've been itching to open this topic for a while. just haven't had a good enough excuse to put it in its own thread. fuzzy logic strikes again...)
Paul