It’s just a word to evoke the idea that serving as much as you can statically while using client-side code and hitting serverless APIs for any needs after that.
The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.
There are all kinds of tech words like this to remember to get right:
- It’s Sass, not SASS.
- It’s Less, not LESS.
- It’s JavaScript, not Javascript.
- It’s WordPress, not WordPress. (LOLZ WordPress won’t let you spell it wrong. Imagine a lowercase “p”.)
- It’s webpack, not Webpack.
- It’s npm, not NPM.
- It’s CodePen, not Codepen.
- It’s CSS-Tricks, not CSS Tricks
Phil offered this in the Jamstack Slack:
I’d just offer this one comparison:
Ajax.
When I first started using Ajax, it was always called “AJAX” and stood for Async JavaScript And XML. Over time, JSON became more popular than XML with this pattern, but we still called it the same thing. And these days we’d refer to it as “Ajax” (if at all, lol) because what it stands for is more than what the acronym consists of.
Am I getting trolled or is there actually a difference between the “WordPress” examples? lol
Regardless, I love this. I was just talking about this yesterday while looking at a resume, that it is sort of painful to see some of the misuse that can occur. Then again, I’m the type of person that is constantly using the Chrome Omnibox to discretely validate everything I do, from spelling and definitions to proper use of idioms and movie quotes – all without pressing “enter” and cementing it into your search history (lifesaver!).
Apparently there is some code in wordpress (:p) that corrects its spelling. I think this is quite a nitpicky topic anyway – capitalization is more about styling than anything else. That being said it’s good to have consistency in everything, even seemingly trivial factors, so I’m happy to see someone addressed this.
Unless you turn it off, there’s a filter attached to many functions called capital_P_dangit() that makes sure it’s spelled correctly.
Worth the extra nanosecond of processing power? You be the judge.
Simple rule for uppercase letters: If you spell every single letter use uppercase (USA, CSS, NPM). If you read it as a normal word, use mixed case (Ikea, Nato, Jamstack). I’m not the company’s marketing person that tries to be special by foiling spelling rules and getting extra visible with uppercase letters. And capitalize first letters of proper names (Webpack, Adidas).
Concerning camelcase (JavaScript, WordPress) I’m unsure. Maybe if the parts could be seen as two words then the camelcase could help the reader. If it’s just for the effect (sample, anyone?), I ignore it. And: The more a name has established, the more camelcasing gets unneccessary, so: Javascript, Wordpress, Codepen).
Isn’t great if a company comes up with a name that doesn’t need unUsual speL·Ling RULeS?
GitHub not Github
Just to add some info on Ajax:
The thing with “AJAX” vs. “Ajax” is that it was never intended to be used as “AJAX” (all upercase). Jesse Jame Garrett is the one who originally coined the term. Here is an archive of the first version of the article in which he introduced the term.
In there he says:
Notice, he didn’t say “The name is an acronym…” He said it was “shorthand”, so “AJAX” was never correct.