Should URL be case sensitive?

Question

I noticed that

HTTP://STACKOVERFLOW.COM/QUESTIONS/ASK

and

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask

both works fine - actually the previous one is converted to lowercase.

I think that this makes sense for the user.

If I look at Google then this URL works fine:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/corporate/index.html  

but this one with "ABOUT" is not working:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/ABOUT/corporate/index.html   

Should the URL be case sensitive?

Answer 1

All “insensitive”s are boldened for readability.

Domain names are case insensitive according to RFC 4343. The rest of URL is sent to the server via the GET method. This may be case sensitive or not.

Take this page for example, stackoverflow.com recieves GET string /questions/7996919/should-url-be-case-sensitive, sending a HTML document to your browser. Stackoverflow.com is case insensitive because it produces the same result for /QUEStions/7996919/Should-url-be-case-sensitive.

On the other hand, Wikipedia is case sensitive except the first character of the title. The URLs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_sensitivity and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/case_sensitivity leads to the same article, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASE_SENSITIVITY returns 404.

Answer 2

Old question but I stumbled here so why not take a shot at it since the question is seeking various perspective and not a definitive answer.

w3c may have its recommendations - which I care a lot - but want to rethink since the question is here.

Why does w3c consider domain names be case insensitive and leaves anything afterwards case insensitive ?

I am thinking that the rationale is that the domain part of the URL is hand typed by a user. Everything after being hyper text will be resolved by the machine (browser and server in the back).

Machines can handle case insensitivity better than humans (not the technical kind:)).

But the question is just because the machines CAN handle that should it be done that way ?

I mean what are the benefits of naming and accessing a resource sitting at hereIsTheResource vs hereistheresource ?

The lateral is very unreadable than the camel case one which is more readable. Readable to Humans (including the technical kind.)

So here are my points:-

Resource Path falls in the somewhere in the middle of programming structure and being close to an end user behind the browser sometimes.

Your URL (excluding the domain name) should be case insensitive if your users are expected to touch it or type it etc. You should develop your application to AVOID having users type the path as much as possible.

Your URL (excluding the domain name) should be case sensitive if your users would never type it by hand.

Conclusion

Path should be case sensitive. My points are weighing towards the case sensitive paths.

Answer 3

For websites hosted in a Linux server, URL is case sensitive. http://www.google.com/about and http://www.google.com/About will be redirected to different locations. While in a Windows Server, URL is case-insensitive, as in naming a FOLDER and will be redirected to same location.

Answer 4

URL characters are converted into hex code (if you've ever noticed spaces in URLs being displayed as %20, etc.), and since lower and upper case have different hex values, it makes perfect sense that URLs are most definitely case sensitive. However the spirit of the question seems to be SHOULD that be the standard and I say no, but they are. Its up to the developer/provider to account for this in their code if they want it to work regardless for an end user.

Answer 5

the question is should the url be case sensitive?

I see no use, or good practice behind case sensitive URL's. It stupid, it sucks and should be avoided at all times.

Just to back up my opinion, when someone asks what URL, how could you explain what characters of the URL are Upper or Lower case? That's nonsense and should no one ever tell you otherwise.

Answer 6

According to W3's "HTML and URLs" they should:

There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn't matter, but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive.