HTML help-Any Webpage wizards? Case sensitive question

Doug W

Greetings,

This is somewhat kX related because my Webpage involves a kX topic so you can legally help me out here...

What I know about HTML is what I have learned from an old HTML software "EASY HTML", so there are a lot of holes in my HTML knowledge base and I may be missing something here that others got the first day in HTML 101 concerning case sensitivity.

Here is my confusion: I just changed my ISP and so I put my Webpage up on the new server. I remember that at the old server, I had to change all my references to image files to upper case or they wouldn't show up on the page like the example below:

SRC="SMALLKXLOGO.jpg"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With my new ISP I had to write it like exactly like I had named the file being referenced like the example below:

SRC="SmallKXLogo.jpg"

The actual file is in this form (casewise) SmallKXLogo.jpg
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So if someone can clue me in here on what probably everybody else in the world but me already knows about HTML code I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks,
Doug

Mata Hari

Your old server was likely a windows server, which are case insensitive & case preserving, the new server is a *nix (linux/unix/bsd) server, which is case sensitive.
The *nix way is the correct one and the html standard is itself case preserving... that the windows servers get away with using a case insensitive approach is pure luck and a break of protocol (as is any protocol which MS implements)

fix:
Be case sensitive as the protocol asks, and you can run the site on both MS and *nix servers (test on a *nix server if possible, or use a good html site editor which checks case).
Another, possibly better fix is to rename each and every file to lowcase so you won't run into this problem at all.

Doug W

Thanks for the reply. I will rename all my files lowercase. I searched this before on Google a couple of ISPs ago when I ran into the same problem but never found the answer. I am impressed to get the answer so quickly.

Why do you say the nix way is correct? Is there actually a recognized set of standards out there?

Thanks for the help,
Doug

Mata Hari

Yes, the http standards specify a preferance over case sensitive systems over case insensitive.
You can read up on those protocols at http://www.w3.org/Protocols/
Note btw, that this is about http (hypertext transfer protocol), which sis the protocol that a webserver speaks to a browser to retreive files.
html itself is just a markup language which describes how to display a certain page in the browser, and html itself is case insensitive but case preserving, the html tags can be in any case form you want, but filenames (src tags) in the tags will be preserved.

Doug W

I will check out that link. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

Doug