----- Original Message -----
From: "David Gerard"
<dgerard(a)gmail.com>
On 13 May 2011 08:42, Jay Ashworth
<jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
Repeat after me: "Not all Mediawikiae are
Wikipedia; Wikipedia is
merely
*the most important* customer of the project, not the only one". No,
it would *not* be good to make the base package
page-title-case-folding.
While your first sentence is the case, this says nothing about these
other users.
What is your actual basis for asserting that case-insensitivity is
worse than case-sensitivity? What is your data? Where did your
statement come from?
25 years experience in software design.
Assuming case-folding is acceptable is imposing your assumptions about
other people's use cases upon the software, and hence them. Not doing so,
well, isn't.
Every MediaWiki I've ever had cause to set up
would have benefited
spectacularly from case-insensitivity, for example.
And having it available as an option's a great idea. But forcing it
*absolutely* rules out some potential use-cases, which is rarely a
good idea in software design; especially in the case of *tools* design,
which is what Mediawiki is: it's a tool as much as it's an application.
Ask someone who's tried to implement a parser that will deal with all
of Wikipedia's templates if you don't believe me. :-)
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates
http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA
http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274