Monday, 10 March 2014

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

Posted on 21:11 by Swanand Pangam | 1 comment
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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