http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry

this surprised me

4/22/2007 9:28:56 PM

the internet is an amazing place. who would've thought capital letters and lowercase letters were the same characters

4/22/2007 9:40:35 PM

1) wikipedia is not "the internet". Wikipedia has all sorts of redirects available for it, and capitlization might or might not be important. In that case, it is.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ipod
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipod

2) on normal webpages, anything after the .com/, .net/, .edu/ etc is case sensitive. anything before that is not.
e.g. ThEWOLFweb.com and thewolfweB.com both go to the same place. But anything after .com is generally an actual name of a file or folder on the webserver, so yes, it is case sensitive

4/22/2007 9:49:55 PM

^ only if on a linux box, though, right?

4/22/2007 9:52:45 PM

I had always been told that ^

4/22/2007 10:20:32 PM

^,^^
The way a webserver responds to stuff after the / is purely a software trick. It doesn't even have to refer to an actual folder (although by default webservers respond this way). On Wiki for example, the /blackberry is not so much a directory as it is a command input. Like the message_topic.aspx? on TWW or the search? in a google query.

4/22/2007 10:24:00 PM

yeah, but message_topic.aspx is the name of a file and it is case sensitive. what comes after the ? of course, depends on how the query is handled

4/22/2007 10:26:19 PM

^ that's true, but it could easily be programmed to be case sensitive if the web server software author so felt it should be.

[Edited on April 22, 2007 at 10:34 PM. Reason : basically, it's not neccesarily dependent on the OS or file system.]

4/22/2007 10:34:21 PM

The World Wide Web is not the Internet either. Unbelievably, many do not know this simple fact.

4/23/2007 6:29:13 AM

Unix/Linux webservers are case sensitive by default

Windows servers are not due to the fact that they dont let you name 2 folders "Folder" and "folder".

So while the internet is technically case sensitive, most webservers are not. (This is not me saying that most web servers are windows, but typically the webserver doesn't care if there are caps in the titles).

4/23/2007 6:37:03 AM

^wrong. most webservers = apache, and apache is case sensitive. at least, every installation i've ever seen has been.

and the GET vars (the ?topic=393405 and so on) are just that.. variables.. they are left up to the software interpreter.

apache can also be set up to parse the URL (the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry) to get variables out of it. the /wiki/BlackBerry does not refer to an actual location on the server, but it tells PHP or whatever they're using to go to a database and fetch the content.

4/23/2007 7:51:00 AM