Why are Github project document page urls case sen

Question

I Just uploaded a sample index.html page for my github project repo gh-pages branch. However it seems the url used to access the documentation is case sensitive. The correct url is as follows,

http://harindaka.github.com/ASPTokenInput/

However if I use the same url in lowercase github displays a page not found message. i.e.

http://harindaka.github.com/asptokeninput/

1. Why is the URL case sensitive?
2. Will this negatively affect search engine visibility and browser caching etc.?
3. What are the disadvantages/advantages of a case sensitive url approach?
4. Does this mean some other project can have the same name and url in a different case on github? (shivers :-O)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The url is case sensitive, but the domain is not. So

http://harindaka.github.com/ASPTokenInput/

differs from

http://harindaka.github.com/asptokeninput/

but

http://HARINDAKA.github.com/ASPTokenInput/

does not.

Read the RFC; http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986

Answer 2

I am not sure this is directly related to GitHub.
The w3c standards does mention:

URLs in general are case-sensitive (with the exception of machine names).
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.

In other words, you cannot be sure what OS is behind the web server you are accessing (a case-sensitive Linux one, or not a case-sensitive one with Windows, as described in the article "Are URLs Case Sensitive?").

Answer 3

If you have a personal github page (username.github.io), you can create a folder inside this repository with your project name in lowercase, and inside that folder create an index.html redirecting to original url. As example: https://github.com/MiguelPynto/MiguelPynto.github.io/tree/master/shiftdisplay

Answer 4

For your 4th question, I just tried to create a new repository on Github which would only differ by case to an existing one (of my own account), and I got a "Name is already taken" message. So, no, you can't have two repositories differing only by case.

(It is possible to have directories and files inside the repository differing only by case, if your file system allows this, though.)

Answer 5

Having case-sensitive URLs is nice and all for computers. Search engines will be fine, they are, in the end, different ASCII characters. As per users, they will most of the times get confused and think the page doesn't work.

One could either use a redirection URL for the GitHub page and never advertise the GitHub URL, or just indicate URL (case sensitive) everywhere.