🚀 go-pugleaf

Gabriel R. Rios asks us to confirm that:
> The domain part of the address is not case sensitive since it relies
> on a domain server.  The directory path and filename are case
> sensitive only if the website is hosted from a UNIX server.

This is correct to a first approximation.  To a zeroeth approximation (the
one I teach in web publishing) I simply tell people that URLs are case
sensitive and leave it at that.

Some browser implementations treat the access method ("http", "ftp",
"mailto", etc. as case sensitive).  The password part of a
ftp://user:password@host/path URL is also case sensitive if passwords on
the remote system are (almost everywhere).

Of the major current web server platforms, only Unix has a truly case
sensitive native file system, but URLs can refer to other things besides
files.  Any web server might be configured to distinguish based on case.
For example, a web server that runs on a Mac might accept paths of the form
/search.acgi?Foo or even /search.acgi/Foo and use the string "Foo" for a
local search of some sort.  As most people on this list are aware, search
engines typically do attend to case information.  Even if the web server is
IIS on Windows NT, the actual files it is accessing might be on a case
sensitive file system (e.g. an NFS-mounted file system or something), in
which case (pun) the path portion of the URL would be sensitive there as
well.

Finally, most browsers cache files and record history based on the
case-sensitive pathname.

JQ Johnson                      office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 541-346-1746 (v) -3485 (fax)
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