[thelist] FW: Link Rot

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 18:13 -0700, Joel Canfield wrote:
     [I wrote:]
> > If people are getting used to case insensitivity, they are getting used
> > to error recovery behavior
> 
> I contend that they're getting used to the machine adjusting to humans,
> rather than us adjusting to them.
> 
> If I type my name Joel or joel, I don't expect others to think I'm two
> people. If a computer, by design or accident, doesn't know that, I will not
> adjust to the computer. Let it adjust to me.

There are cases where case insensitivity should not apply. However, the
specification says URLs are case sensitive, and there are applications
where case sensitivity matters and is used on a daily basis (YouTube).
At minimum, if a server application is going to act in a case
insensitive fashion, it should 301 redirect to either the correct case
or a canonical case, rather than just blindly returning the same 200
response to two different URLs that in reality point to the same
document. (This is so caching proxies only cache one copy.)

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>