Filename case-insensitivity on OS X

Dan Lowe dan at tangledhelix.com
Fri Jan 6 14:55:02 EST 2006


On Jan 6, 2006, at 1:13 PM, Mark Jackson wrote:

> Dan Lowe <dan at tangledhelix.com> writes:
>
>> Think about it - how many things used by average people are case
>> sensitive? Passwords? That's about it. (And judging by most user
>> passwords I have seen, they're almost all lowercase anyway.) Email
>> addresses, URLs, the search box in Google, your AOL or Jabber buddy
>> list: all case-insensitive.
>
> Not all URLs.  Compare, for example:
>
> http://www.python.org/doc/Summary.html
> http://www.python.org/doc/summary.html

You are correct, of course. I was thinking of cases like this:

http://www.python.org
HTTP://WWW.PYTHON.ORG
hTtP://www.PyThOn.ORG

So I should have said "hostnames" instead of "URLs". In my  
experience, most URLs that are actually typed in are like this...

http://yahoo.com
http://google.com
http://ebay.com
http://apple.com
http://amazon.com

And in that form, they are not case sensitive. They only become that  
way when you start putting more on the end. But I'd guess that 90%+  
of the time, URLs of that form are clicked on, not typed into the  
browser.

  -dan

-- 
You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have  
nothing more
to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
             -Antoine de Saint-Exupery





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