[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
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668 




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list