Re: Why are classes and URIs case sensitivity?

The short answer is that 
- URIs are by definition case sensitive and
- CamelCase is considered an ergonomic technique for marking words in strings, in particular identifiers. Other choices like dots (.), dashes/minus (-) or underscore (_) are, in the eyes of many, less legible and/or less efficient to type.

Without getting in the full story, URIs used as identifiers are always identical only if they are the same character-by-character, while a server can support various techniques for dealing with slight variations in, e.g. missing trailing slashes or differences in capitalization when fulfilling a request to return a representation for a URI ("dereferencing").

Of course, the schema.org server could be more tolerant to spelling mistakes and redirect requests to the proper capitalization, but that is a different story.
Martin

On Dec 4, 2013, at 5:20 PM, Jarno van Driel wrote:

> After a discussion with +Aaron Bradley I had a question I thought was worth posting here...
> 
> Why is uppercasing the first letter of each (subsequent) word being used for classes and URIs?
> 
> Now this question has an SEO origin, since it's considered bad practice to have URLs return different content depending on upper- and/or lowercasing (part of) the URL. I was wondering why classes and URIs deviate from this. 
> 
> Now I bet there are good reasons for this but I can't find a clear description about the 'why' and hoped one of you could clarify this for me.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Jarno van Driel

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martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

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Received on Wednesday, 4 December 2013 16:44:32 UTC