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Comment by mtowle | Hacker News Reader

The top python link, which should direct to http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ instead directs to http://www.crummy.com/software/beautifulsoup/ --which causes crummy.com to throw a 404 error at you.

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You learn something every day. I was sure URLs are not case sensitive until now.

While domain names are not case-sensitive, the rest of the URL might be. In our example, this would be everything that follows “.com” as in wisegeek.com/are-urls-case-sensitive.htm.

Think about it, the host server gets the path string raw, it's up to it how to interpret it.

Ideally, it would do a redirect to the ‘canonical’ resource (all lowercase, e.g.), so that the browser only has to cache stuff once – but that would take another request at least once. Is there some way for the server to serve the content and redirect in the same reply? As in ‘Here’s your picture, but it is really called foo.jpg rather than FOO.jpg’?

Somewhat related, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that browsers treat assets with different URL casing as different assets for purposes of caching. Three image elements that reference Foo.jpg, foo,jpg, and foo.JPG all require a separate request and space in the cache, even if the web server you're using is case-insensitive and all three URLs resolve to the same image.

I always add:

    CheckSpelling off

To my dev (but not production) server so that I catch things like that. This won't help with a case insensitive web server though.

Thanks for the heads up, fixed.

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