[pmwiki-users] Re: Make URLs not case sensitive?
Neil Herber
nospam at mail.eton.ca
Fri Jan 28 11:57:22 CST 2005
At 2005-01-28 06:36 PM +0100, chr at home.se is rumored to have said:
>I'd very much want to preserve case sensitivity in the URI for both the
>group name and the page name. Otherwise I don't see how we differentiate
>between a group called 'Howtos' (as in plural of How-to) versus 'HowToS'
>(where we have HowToA, HowToB etc). Sorry that I couldn't come up with an
>example that's easier to understand.
Those of us who are not familiar with the crunchy goodness (TM) of
Unix-like case sensitivity, find it hard to believe that a file called
HowToS would not also be called HowTos or howtos. Somewhere I read that
CamelCase arose when programmers got tired of writing how_to_s and they
decided that HowToS was faster.
Given that page names in PmWiki seem to be relatively long and explicit
(DocumentationIndex, for example), I think collisions caused by conversion
to all lowercase should be quite rare. It would then eliminate the need for
mod_speling, or alternate case checking in PmWiki itself.
Just to be perfectly clear, I am advocating that Page and Group names
preserve case when displayed on PmWiki pages, but that filenames be all
converted to lowercase. Users don't get to see the filenames anyway.
>Having said the above, I could see the advantage if the URI is
> http://pmwiki.org/wiki/MAin/SomePage
>that pmwiki first checks for a group called 'MAin/SomePage' and if that
>doesn't exist it starts a case insensitive search (on group names). I
>assume the URI should be redirected in this case so that the resulting URI
>would be.
>
> http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Main/SomePage
This open up a huge can of worms. Which one should PmWiki retrieve?
http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Main/SomePage
http://pmwiki.org/wiki/main/SomePage
http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Main/somePage
http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Main/somepage
http://pmwiki.org/wiki/main/somepage
A contrived example, to be sure, but no worse than How To S! ;->
Neil
Neil Herber
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Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668
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