CamelCase and Wiki
From Free net encyclopedia
The original wiki/WikiWiki convention for creating hyperlinks was the use of CamelCase to indicate a link.
Due to problems inherent in such syntax, some Wikis (such as Wikipedia) eventually switched to what were called Free Links, where alternative syntax allowed any sequence of characters to be a link.
Details
A word became a link, with the link name equal to that word, and the link target being the page with that name, if it was in CamelCase form, with the additional requirement that the non-leading capitals had to be followed by a lower-case letter. Hence AlabamA and ABc would not be links (see WikiCase on WikiWiki and also CamelCase on WikiWiki). In the Wiki context, CamelCase was called WikiWord or WikiName.
The following do not strictly qualify as bicapitalization, but are CamelCase for the purposes of the original version of the WikiWiki software:
- AlabamA (CamelCased words need at least two components)
- aNaRcHy cAsE
Problems
CamelCasedTerms are recognized by search engine spiders and indexers as single words, thus ranking pages incorrectly (a word in the URL generally rates a page as related to that word). Separating words (using hyphens between words in local paths or in DNS names; underscore is invalid for DNS names) addresses this. Removing case sensitivity from links also allows use of tools such as Apache's mod_speling, and easier guessing of URLs by people.