[pmwiki-users] Re: How use lowercase in Group Names

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 08:27:04AM +0200, chr at home.se wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> 
> > Let me try to frame the overall problem a bit -- given a url 
> > such as .../pmwiki.php?n=main.homepage, PmWiki has to determine the
> > correct case of "main.homepage" so that it can be stored in $pagename.
> 
> What about ambiguities due to treating page names (or group names to a
> lesser extent) without considering the case?
> 
> Let's theoretically say my name is Martin and I'm a doctor. I might then
> decide to create a group called DrM, with the home page DrM.DrM. But
> someone else might like to create a group called DRM (with the homepage
> DRM.DRM), which would be about digital rights management.

On a case-insensitive filesystem such as Windows, there's 
absolutely no choice in the matter -- DrM.DrM is the same 
page as DRM.DRM.

I believe my answer to this will be that for administrators
on case-sensitive filesystems, choosing to support case-insensitive
urls is an option and the price of the option is that there can
be ambiguities when there are two or more pages that differ
only in case and a url refers to neither one exactly.

> Completely orthogonal to this issue, I think it would be nice to be able
> to have names (page and/or group) that are completely in lower case.
> 
> (I'm not sure if this is relevant, but Swedish rarely have capitalized
> words in our titles, making the mixed case unnatural for swedish pages).
> 
> So... if we didn't use mixed case to separate the words, what could we use 
> instead?   Well, what about '+', although that is such a simple suggestion 
> so I assume it's already been discussed before.

It would undoubtedly be an underscore.  '+' is not so good because
it has to be encoded as %2b in urls, unless you were really meaning
the '+' in its "space" meaning in urls, in which case keeping track
of when to use '+', ' ', and '%2b' just confuses people.

However, I'd also presume that a site that wanted to go this way 
(lowercase words with spaces) would be willing to accept the loss 
of wikiwords, or at least that DocumentationIndex, 
[[DocumentationIndex]], and [[documentation index]] won't all refer 
to the same page and that there's not a wikiword form of
[[documentation index]].  Not that this is an invalid or bad way 
to go, but it is a consequence of making that choice.

Pm