Does the CSS property "text-transform" affect SEO results?

Question

I am building a site with a ton of 1999 style capitalization of navigation and headings. I have been simply adding in the text content as it appears (capitalized), but the other designer on the project insists on using lower case text in his HTML and capitalizing it with an applied style:

.tedious {text-transform:uppercase;}

I understand the argument of separation of style from content, but in this case it really doesn't matter because I personally will not maintain the site, nor do I ever imagine that the client will need to un-capitalize all of this text. The question is: 1. will search engines pay any attention at all to capitalization of text in a document and 2. would a crawler go so far as to read my style sheet and look for such things (me thinks not). I know that BOLD, STRONG, EM, etc have a (diminishing) effect on SEO so I can imagine a scenario where CAPS would, but have never heard of anyone actually claiming, let alone confirming this.

Digging this site the last few months. First post.

Answer 1

No, it will not affect SEO. Search engine crawlers such as Googlebot do not parse CSS and JavaScript and index your content only by the markup.

Answer 2

if i was a search engine - I wouldn't care about casing. I would care about the content.

From a human readability standpoint - upper case isn't as easy to read.

Answer 3

It will only effect what is shown in the search results, you colleagues work will show as lower case in the results.

You mentioned separation of style from content, but i'm not convinced that text-transform is a style really, it's a change of content, i'm sure some people would argue the other side though.

Answer 4

Caring about aesthetics would just be a nonsense in separation of presentation and content concept.

What about .not-important-at-all {text-transform:uppercase;} then ? What about color then(is red more important than green?), font-weight, font-size...

Definitely, no.