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§27.4. Authorship
Extensions are identified by author and by name, so that a given author can produce his or her own range of extensions, and need only ensure that these are named differently from each other. If John Smith and Mary Brown each want to write an extension called "Following People", there is no conflict.
The name of an extension, and of an author, should be written in Sentence Capitalisation: that is, upper case for the first letter in each word. (Inform uses this to minimise problems on machines where filenames are read with case sensitivity.) It is permitted for author names to include upper-case letters within words, as with the "G" in "Jesse McGrew". In general it is best to avoid accented or unusual letters in titles and author names, but the standard ISO Latin-1 characters should be allowed - for instance,
The author name must not start with "The", nor contain the words "by", "and" or "version", or contain punctuation, as in "John X. Doe"; the title similarly, except that "and" is permitted. Name and author's name must each be no more than 50 characters long, including any spaces between words.
Authors are asked to use real names rather than cryptic handles like "ifguy", and to use genteel, plausible pseudonyms like "Emily Short" rather than, say, "Drooling Zombie" or "Team Inform". Authors are also asked to use the same author's name for all their own extensions, and (it should go without saying) not to masquerade as anybody else.
Sometimes authorship is complicated. What if Mary Brown finds some Inform 6 code written by John Smith in the mid-90s, and puts an I7 gloss on it to make an I7 extension, but then Pierre Dupont translates it into French: who's the author of the result? The rule is that the person making the current, latest version is the author listed in the titling line, so we end up with
But Mary and John deserve their credits too: see the next section for how to give them.
