RE: [users@httpd] make URL's case insensitive - (opinion - OT)

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Kew [mailto:nick@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> 
> It is HTTP, the protocol of the Web, that is case-sensitive.
> Anything that tries to pretend it's not is broken.

Exactly.

The whole concept of "case-sensitivity" is wrong-headed to begin with. The case of a letter is an essential part of its semantics and cannot be dispensed with without losing information. 

To give an example, the other night, I was in a restaurant and one of the items on the menu was "Filets de perche d'Orange". In a case-insensitive world, you might expect your fish to come with orange sauce. But there was important information in the capital "O" in "Orange"... As it turns out the restaurant was called the "Hotel D'Orange" and so the menu was telling us that the dish was done in the special style of that hotel (garlic butter, actually). So the case of a single letter changed completely the semantics of the phrase and the taste of the fish.

Filenames and URLs are meant for human consumption and so reflect the underlying semantics of human language (otherwise we'd just use inodes and IP addresses). So if case is important in our written language it must be important on a computer too.

Rgds,
Owen Boyle
Disclaimer: Any disclaimer attached to this message may be ignored. 

> 
> -- 
> Nick Kew
> 
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