Subject:
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Re: Halloween Lego Design Contest Reminder and Update
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Sat, 9 Oct 1999 16:12:51 GMT
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Viewed:
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2226 times
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In lugnet.publish, Frank Filz <ffilz@mindspring.com> writes:
> Todd Lehman wrote:
> >
> > In lugnet.build, Matthew Miller writes:
> > > [...] And the server appears to be completely case-insensitive. [...]
> >
> > Boo hiss, extremely evil!
>
> Ok, since this is to some extent an appropriate newsgroup...
>
> Why do you see case insensitivity as evil? I find case sensitivity evil.
> I have seen very little need to case sensitivity.
First, to be case-insensitive is to create a non-1-to-1 (and therefore
non-invertible) mapping of characters which destroys the usefulness and
expressiveness of 20% of the character set domain (about 1/3 of the
typically usable characters).
Second, case-insensitive web servers (that is, case insensitivity in URLs)
requires browsers to hash on a case-mapped version of the URL rather than
the actual URL. In other words, if, via some document, you've already
clicked on
http://www.foo.foo/Case/Insensitive/Filename.html
and then somewhere else you encounter a link made to that same document a
slightly different way,
http://www.foo.foo/case/insensitive/filename.html
then this causes the link to show in the wrong color -- unless your browser
ignores case in URLs (which is isn't supposed to).
Unfortunately (and not related to case), both NN and MSIE think that these
refer to different resources (they don't):
http://www.lego.com/worlds.asp
http://www.lego.com/worlds%2Easp
Now, nobody ever writes "%2E" when they mean ".", but people do sometimes
write "%7E" when they mean "~", so this general issue does come up in
practice. A related problem, which is related to case, is that NN thinks
these two URLs refer to different resources (they don't):
http://www.LEGO.com/worlds.asp
http://www.lego.com/worlds.asp
(MSIE does get the link coloring right on that one. :)
Case insensitivity is arguably good for humans, because humans sometimes
have trouble remembering whether something was capitalized or not, or if it
was, they sometimes are too lazy to use the Shift key. If any webserver
handles URLs in a case-insensitive way, it should (IMHO) only do so if it
sends back a 'Location:' header to redirect the browser to the "correct and
preferred version" of the URL, just as a webserver corrects URLs when the
trailing slash is missing.
Anyway, it's not that case sensitivity is *needed* per se, but that case
insensitivity creates far more problems that it solves. It's evil.
--Todd
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