Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 09/26/06 14:16

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

> Something the Windows user must always be aware if is that unlike
> Windows most webservers are not on Windows platforms and filenames
> and paths are case-sensitive. The domain name is only where you can
> be lax because they are not case-sensitive.

Well, yes, but I'd say that's putting the cart before the horse. URLs
are by definition case-sensitive, and that's got nothing to do with
the particular file system used on any specific server. It just so
happens that when URLs are mapped to files on a Windows server, then
typically two different URLs which differ only in their case are
mapped to the same file i.e although the URLs are different, they
access the same resource.

It's not a good idea to rely on this - one should be consistent.

> I recommend any Windows users that want to do any significant amount
> of web site development to find an old computer and slap together a
> LAMP server and do your development there rather than with local
> files. Will save you much debug frustration....

You make a good point. For most purposes, I'd recommend Windows users
to install Win32 Apache locally, and use that for browsing their
development site. There's far too many shortcomings involved in
browsing files directly, without a server. But in regard to case
sensitivity, it's going to have the same issues as we are discussing.

[Back to original message]