[Zope] Newbie: Case independent URLs?

[Fearless Froggie]

The advantage with Oliver's approach is it gives you a
chance to "educate" your users. Use the 404 page to
show them the correct page, and explain to them what
they did wrong. And then they'll explain it to two
friends, and so on and so on . . . and we'll never
have those kinds of user errors again!

Rita Mikusch
Fantasy Land

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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.  

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?

Like:

"the address
(http://yourserver/somedir/somedokument.PDF) which you

entered does not exist, maybe you meant:
http://yourserver/somedir/somedocument.pdf"


Because from my expirience, confusing upper and lower
case is not the 
only thing people confuse.


cheers,
oliver


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