Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[Neil Hodgson]

> You'll notice that a url is case sensitive and urls are bandied about as
> currency so in my opinion I think the population can generally handle
case.

   URLs are case sensitive but domain names are insensitive in practice and
most URLs bandied about with the intent of seeing them manually entered are
bare domain names. I don't know if domain names are insensitive by design or
there is something that fixes my typing by doing a search but asking for
weirdly cased domains works.

   Looking at the statistics for my web site last week, of 16000 hits, there
were 73 misses of which 4 were miscapitalisations, 3 look strange with
little relation to the site, and none look like misspellings (the others
were for robots.txt and a file I removed). So someone has failed to see what
they want because of case sensitive URLs. I would expect that most hits come
from clicking on references so there should be little need for manually
typed URLs but when used they will lead to errors because of capitalisation.

   Neil