[Pmwiki-users] Re: Case Insensitive URLs

Eric Celeste efc
Fri Apr 2 19:18:35 CST 2004


> Drawback #1: What if you have pages called ITCouncilMinutes and
> ITcouncilMinutes?

I actually think this would be an advantage of case-insensitive URLs. You
could not end up with two pages with these names, since the wiki would
normalize both to the same file "itcouncilminutes". My guess is that there
are many more cases of case differences getting in the way (how often have
you said to a user of your wiki "wait, that first letter is uppercase"?)
than there are cases where case difference is critical and useful.

In general on the web, URLs tend to have normalized to lowercase anyway.
Many of us just name our files all lower to keep instructions simpler.
PmWiki could go one better by allowing the user to type whatever combo of
upper and lower they desired, and still it would return the "right" page.
That could be very cool.

True, it does limit our filename choices. I couldn't have both
"EveryDaytime" and "EverydayTime" in my PmWiki group. That, and the
potential backward-incompatibility it induces, would argue for this being an
option, a switch we could throw in config.php, rather than the default
behavior. I would love to throw the "$CaseInsensitiveURL=1" switch if it
existed.

...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





More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list