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Why are Github project document page urls case sensitive? What are the negative effects?

I Just uploaded a sample index.html page for my github project repo gh-pages branch. However it seems the url used to access the documentation is case sensitive. The correct url is as follows,

http://harindaka.github.com/ASPTokenInput/

However if I use the same url in lowercase github displays a page not found message. i.e.

http://harindaka.github.com/asptokeninput/

  1. Why is the URL case sensitive?
  2. Will this negatively affect search engine visibility and browser caching etc.?
  3. What are the disadvantages/advantages of a case sensitive url approach?
  4. Does this mean some other project can have the same name and url in a different case on github? (shivers :-O)

Thanks in advance.

Solution

  • For your 4th question, I just tried to create a new repository on Github which would only differ by case to an existing one (of my own account), and I got a "Name is already taken" message. So, no, you can't have two repositories differing only by case.

    (It is possible to have directories and files inside the repository differing only by case, if your file system allows this, though.)