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List:       wikitech-l
Subject:    Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Title characters
From:       Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw () users ! sourceforge ! net>
Date:       2003-05-27 19:39:45
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On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 02:18:39PM -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw@users.sourceforge.net>):
> > 
> > Well, I'm more concerned about "UNIX" vs. "Unix".
> 
> Or more generally, acronyms. "CAT" is computer assisted tomography,
> while "cat" is a furry creature.  But if we did go to complete
> case-insensitivity, the problem would be merely another source of
> title ambiguity, which we are already used to dealing with (i.e.,
> the "cat" page would deal with the creature and the machine just
> as the "Mercury" page deals with the metal, the planet, and the god),
> so that's not a major impediment.
> 
> We'd have to canonicalize the URLs in some way (for example, by
> making every character in the URL lowercase all the time), and then
> make a guess about what actual title to create for new pages.
> 
> I don't know if it's possible to make every case easy, so we have
> to settle for making the majority of cases easy. I think most page
> titles are still such that they should be capitalized as titles but
> not in running text, just like "cat". So the present system handles
> the common case well. True, it doesn't handle some other cases, but
> I'm not really sure we could do that without complicating the more
> common case.
> 
> I'd need to see more argument about exactly how to handle this
> before I'd be convinced to change it.

We need 2 canonical forms - database canonical form for linking,
always lowercase, and presentation canonical forms, which is by default
ucfirst(title_of_link_that_created_article), and can be overriden
by #CANONICALFORM iMac or something.
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