On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 02:18:39PM -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
(Tomasz
Wegrzanowski <taw(a)users.sourceforge.net>)t>):
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.