General misconceptions about Internet - what is case sensitive on Internet?

Mumbai. The number of Internet users in India are increasing at a very rapid rate. As per World Bank report in 2012, 12.6% of Indians are using Internet. Most of these people are the first time Internet users on portable gadgets like mobile, tablet or laptop.



For these new users, we will start with general misconceptions on Internet related to case sensitive data.

 

What do you mean by 'case sensitive'?

"Text sometimes exhibits case sensitivity; that is, words can differ in meaning based on differing use of uppercase and lowercase letters. Words with capital letters do not always have the same meaning when written with lowercase letters." - Wikipedia

Then what is case sensitive?

Email Address

• Not many people know this but email address is case sensitive. If myname@xyz.com is an email address then the 'myname' part is called as local part and 'xyz.com' is termed as domain part. The local part is case sensitive but the domain part is not.

• But, most webmail providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc have made their local part case-insensitive.

• So even though email address is case-sensitive you can always teat them as case-insensitive for your convenience.

Password

• No need to explain this. All passwords whether in online or in offline use are striclty case sensitive.

URL

• "Every resource available on the Web --- HTML document, image, video clip, program, etc. --- has an address that may be encoded by a URL (Uniform Resource Locator, previously Universal Resource Locator)." - w3.org
• Only the domain part (the machine name) of URL is case-insensitive.
• Many servers treat URL as case-insensitive (like Microsoft).
• So, its always better to treat URL as case sensitive.

 

What is case-insensitive?

Domain Names

• Although domain names (the machine names) are written in lowercase, Domain Name System is case-insensitive.
• So, www.google.com or WWW.GOOGLE.COM or WWW.google.COM are one and the same.

CAPTCHA

• CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are nowadays used on all websites to get rid of webcrawlers.
• Most of these CAPTCHAs unless specified are case-insensitive.
• I have seen people struggling to guess characters while adjusting their Caps Lock accordingly, so I feel it necessary to mention this.

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New Generic Top Level Domain Names

Mumbai. Since October 2013, many new gTLD [generic Top Level Domains] are made available by ICANN and hundreds are waiting in queue. These gTLD are released on a weekly basis for general public usage.

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What is a DNS?

In order to explain the concept of gTLD, let me explain you what a DNS [Domain-Name System] is and how it's related to an IP address.

Let us consider this example,

www.google.com

• Here, the domain name www.google.com is separated by two dots in between, dividing the it in three labels.

• The .com label on right-hand side is termed as TLD [top level domain]. 

• The second label google is called as domain name. A single TLD has millions and millions of domain names in it. For eg. yahoo.com, facebook.com, etc. are domain names in the TLD .com

• The third label www is what we call a sub-domain. Generally, a sub-domain is the sole property of the respective domain name. For eg. This blog techriots.blogspot.com belongs to Google rather than myself.

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Now, these TLDs are furthermore divided into three subtypes,

1. Country-code TLD [ccTLD]: These TLD's are country specific and mostly two digit in size. ICANN has provided a unique ccTLD to every country and territory and managed by the respective local organiusation. For eg. .in (for India), .us (for USA),etc.
2. Special TLD: .arpa is the only available special-TLD. For more information, click here.
3. Generic TLD [gTLD]: Most TLD with three or more characters are referred to as generic TLD. This is the category which is under tremendous development since the invention of internet.

 

 Initial gTLD

Only seven gTLDs (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org) were created in 1980, of which three (.com, .net, .org) were available without restrictions. Since then this list has been increasing from three to currently hundreds of them being made available and many more to follow suit.

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