From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Sun Jun 02 2002 - 15:52:05 EDT
Alan Horkan <horkana@tcd.ie> wrote in
news:Pine.LNX.4.40.0206022027170.21691-100000@turing.maths.tcd.ie:
> partially case insensitive!
> that has got to be the worst of both worlds
> are you sure?
URIs are *wholly* case sensitive. But URLs where only the case of
domain names differ are equivalent. Most browsers therefore
automatically lowercase domain names, so that link colouring
(visited URIs are shown in a different colour), cache, history,
cookies &c. will work.
Are there any Web servers that's case-insensitive. That's a
*really* bad idea, since link colouring, cache, &c. (see above)
will *not* work when a person visits the page using different URIs
which only differ in case. It can also cause your pages becoming
excluded from search engines because of 'spamming' (different URIs
having the same content are often used to trick search engines
into giving a page a higher ranking, and most search engines
exclude pages using these sorts of tactics).
> i still think apache mod_spel is great, gives useful
> suggestions than giving me just a 404 message.
'mod_speling' (sic!) is a good/right solution, since this does
*not* cause Apache to become case-insensitive. Instead it send
HTTP *redirects* for incorrectly spelled URIs when it can guess
the correct URI. (This may of course be a security risk if you
have secret files/directories on your Web server. (Though, if you
*do*, then your security system is already seriously flawed!))
-- Karl Ove Hufthammer
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