[Zope] Newbie: Case independent URLs?

Robert Allyn allyn@speakeasy.org
Tue, 24 Sep 2002 11:15:00 -0700


I like this suggestion.  It would keep the user, and educate them to the correct URL.  Thanks.

- Robert

At 06:12 PM 9/24/2002 +0200, Oliver Bleutgen wrote:
>Robert Allyn wrote:
>>I agree it is a hassle.  But...
>>My most important "customer" is 60 - 90 years old, often having just started to use a computer.  For them typing, let alone email and the web are all new.  They tend to exchange web page URL's via 'snail' mail, or over the phone.  The chance of them using upper case when it is not needed is pretty high.  I get a number of 404 errors in my log from users typing in the wrong case in a URL.  Because it is all new to them, they figure they did it wrong and give up.  I need to accommodate these people for the site to be useable.
>>That is why I am willing to jump through some hoops to make this work.
>> From a brief look around, it seems IIS and Apache on Windows are case insensitive, as the OS is too dumb to know the difference. 
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>Maybe a dumb suggestion, but couldn't you just write a customized 404 error page which uses the zcatalog and some logic which offers one or more alternative, existing pages from your site?
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>Like:
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>"the address (http://yourserver/somedir/somedokument.PDF) which you entered does not exist, maybe you meant:
>http://yourserver/somedir/somedocument.pdf"
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>Because from my expirience, confusing upper and lower case is not the only thing people confuse.
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>cheers,
>oliver
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