CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails-3parametersuri
Victor S
Victor S

Reputation: 5142

Why are urls usually lowercase with words separated by a dash and no special characters?

As an example, the Rails parameterize method would create a string like so:

"hello-there-joe-smith" == "Hello There Joe.Smith".parameterize

For legacy reasons, a project I am working on requires uppercase letters as well as periods to be available in a particular URL parameter.

Why would this ever be a problem?

Clarification

The url type I'm talking about is what is used instead of an id, commonly knows as a slug.

Would a Rails app with the following url come to any issues: http://example.com/Smith.Joe?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 243

Answers (1)

Beenish Khan
Beenish Khan

Reputation: 1583

This will be a problem both in terms of SEO and browser caching (and hence performance,)

  1. Search engines are case sensitive, so same URL in different case will be taken as two URLs.

  2. Browser like IE's caching is case sensitive, so eg. if you try to access your page as MYPAGE.aspx and at some place in code, you write it as mypage.aspx then IE will treat them as two different pages and instead of getting it from cahce, it will get it from server.

  3. Dashes should be fine but underscores should be avoided : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Upvotes: 2

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