West, Donavon West

Today I was adding a Settings dialog to a Vista Sidebar gadget that I’m writing for client. It was a simple checkbox with the text “Play an announcement when a new blog post arrives”. I’ve been doing this for years, but all of a sudden I was at a complete loss on whether or not to use a period at the end of my sentence.

So I looked to Internet Explorer for guidance, but found ambiguity. At first I found a checkbox very similar to mine that did in fact have a period.

As I looked on, I found more examples where a period was not used.

I could imagine that if you were using a sentence fragment you might omit the period, but in both cases above the text is in the form of a complete sentence. So Windows UI experts, do I end a sentence with a period or not. I’m thinking no and that my first example is a bug in IE.