Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[Ian Parker]

In article <KkRV4.2479$sW4.14113 at news-server.bigpond.net.au>, Neil
Hodgson <neilh at scintilla.org> writes
>> You'll notice that a url is case sensitive and urls are bandied about as
>> currency so in my opinion I think the population can generally handle
>case.
>
>   URLs are case sensitive but domain names are insensitive in practice and
>most URLs bandied about with the intent of seeing them manually entered are
>bare domain names. I don't know if domain names are insensitive by design or
>there is something that fixes my typing by doing a search but asking for
>weirdly cased domains works.
>
>   Looking at the statistics for my web site last week, of 16000 hits, there
>were 73 misses of which 4 were miscapitalisations, 3 look strange with
>little relation to the site, and none look like misspellings (the others
>were for robots.txt and a file I removed). So someone has failed to see what
>they want because of case sensitive URLs. I would expect that most hits come
>from clicking on references so there should be little need for manually
>typed URLs but when used they will lead to errors because of capitalisation.
>
>   Neil
>
>
>

DNS is case-insensitive hence the insensitivity of domain names.  

I'd assumed the path to be case-sensitive only because it is running on
a case-sensitive OS, such as UNIX.  On Windows NT and VMS the case
doesn't appear to matter.  However, UNIX derived software may not always
make the right assumptions for the underlying OS, thus Apache is case-
sensitive on aliases, but not on files 

I'm familiar with case-insensitive languages and file-systems and I
prefer them, however it seems relatively easy to switch to either style.

Regards

Ian
-- 
Ian Parker