On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 02:18:39PM -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
(Tomasz Wegrzanowski taw@users.sourceforge.net):
Well, I'm more concerned about "UNIX" vs. "Unix".
Or more generally, acronyms. "CAT" is computer assisted tomography, while "cat" is a furry creature. But if we did go to complete case-insensitivity, the problem would be merely another source of title ambiguity, which we are already used to dealing with (i.e., the "cat" page would deal with the creature and the machine just as the "Mercury" page deals with the metal, the planet, and the god), so that's not a major impediment.
We'd have to canonicalize the URLs in some way (for example, by making every character in the URL lowercase all the time), and then make a guess about what actual title to create for new pages.
I don't know if it's possible to make every case easy, so we have to settle for making the majority of cases easy. I think most page titles are still such that they should be capitalized as titles but not in running text, just like "cat". So the present system handles the common case well. True, it doesn't handle some other cases, but I'm not really sure we could do that without complicating the more common case.
I'd need to see more argument about exactly how to handle this before I'd be convinced to change it.
We need 2 canonical forms - database canonical form for linking, always lowercase, and presentation canonical forms, which is by default ucfirst(title_of_link_that_created_article), and can be overriden by #CANONICALFORM iMac or something.