[pmwiki-users] Case-insensitive first letter in page or group name (Was: How use lowercase in Group Names)

chr at home.se chr at home.se
Thu Sep 29 02:51:30 CDT 2005


On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> > 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.

Well, I did mean + in its "space" meaning, but I don't know or understand
the implications. Nor why it'd be difficult to keep track of the
differences between '+', ' ' and '%2b' in the URI.

Just for fun, I tried entering this in Opera
	http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/Some Page
but to my surprise it seems I was redirected to
	http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/SomePage

Anyway, using underscore seems like a good choice.



> 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,

Well, speaking personally, I'd be more than fine with that. Not sure how
true this is in general of course.

> 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]].

I assume that "DocumentationIndex" wouldn't even become a link (which is
what I'd prefer anyway). Having '[[DocumentationIndex]]' and
'[[documentation index]]' point to different pages would also be fine.

However, it would be inconvenient that these don't go to the same page:

	See the [[documentation pages]] for help on different topics.
	[[Documentation pages]] are avaiable for lots of topics.

> Not that this is an invalid or bad way to go, but it is a consequence
> of making that choice.

The last example I gave might actually indicate it is a bad way to go, 
at least for languages that capitalize the first letter in a sentence.

I think we should remember this as an important case of where you probably 
*do* want the links to point to the same page.

So it's kind of funny, but we're back to a case where I find myself 
arguing for case-insensitivity with regard to the very first letter...

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr







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