[Pmwiki-users] Re: Case Insensitive URLs

[Eric Celeste]

> pmwiki/
>  audiences
>  changelog

No. Search output like that would certainly be less than optimal. Although,
for me at least, that would be a close call with the benefits of case
insensitivity for the user. Actually, the search page output, while
admirably clean and simple, might actually benefit from a bit more page
context anyway. If we had to read the page to grab the title, we might get a
bit more info along the way as well, like a bit of the first line or two, or
a bit of context around the "hit". But as it is now, the normalized
lowercase filenames would be painful.

>  1. PmWiki could (and already does) store a page's "official
>     case-sensitive name"...
>  2. For the page's title, the system could simply choose to use the
>     case given in the page name that was used to access the page.

Neither of these is a pretty solution, but I'd opt for (1) over (2). At
least there is some consistency with (1).

> I suspect the real solution will be to (finally?) allow pages to have titles
> that are separate from the page's name (with the default title being the
> page's name if not otherwise specified).

That's the ticket! But a significant transition, to be sure.
 
> I actually considered case-insensitivity when starting PmWiki...

I think the choices made so far have been good ones. I'd opt for keeping
things simple with the case sensitive names and name-title corrolation as
well. I am just wondering whether, as PmWiki is refined and improved, the
issue might ripen enough to be reconsidered.

> Also, note that on some operating systems such as OS/X and
> Windows, PmWiki's page references are already case insensitive because the
> underlying operating system is case insensitive.  AFAIK, neither PmWiki
> nor its users have had any real issues with usability in such environments.

Not quite. I run PmWiki in a MacOS X environment. While it is true that the
OS is case insensitive (odd for a Unix variant), PmWiki still does not
behave in a case-insensitive way. MacOS X files keep the case they were
created with. For example, here is an interaction with MacOS X...

     [x84-33-174:~/junk] efc% touch hello
     [x84-33-174:~/junk] efc% touch Hello
     [x84-33-174:~/junk] efc% ls H*
     tcsh: ls: No match.
     [x84-33-174:~/junk] efc% ls h*
     hello
 
So PmWiki still needs to find the name with the case it used to create it.
Windows may behave differently.

...Eric

Eric Celeste / 612-624-4126 / efc at umn.edu / http://umn.edu/home/efc
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology
University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) Libraries