CamelCase

Created by: mlpvolt, Last modification: 04 Aug 2006 (01:11 UTC)
The original wiki/WikiWiki convention for creating hyperlinks was the use of CamelCase (bicapitalization) to indicate a link. This usage is now deprecated in major wiki knowledge bases due to problems inherent in using such syntax. Wikipedia eventually switched to what were called Free Links, where alternative syntax allowed any sequence of characters to be a link. Eventually wikipedia employed a script to change all remaining camel case page names to the plain language form.

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.

Usability


Perhaps most importantly, a naming convention using plain language pagenames and keywords makes for the easier guessing of URLs and including of wiki-links by users. For example, someone wanting to link their page to one about themes simply inserts the linking tags in the stream of the sentence rather then have to figure out that the content exists at

Themes Package or some other place.

Abandoning Camel Case


Some users advocate, for the purposes of usability and improved navigation, bitweaver.org should abandon camel case for all documentation pages.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase_and_Wiki

Comments

by dspt, 15 Aug 2006 (13:59 UTC)
doesn't work with cyrilics etc.
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