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I noticed that
HTTP://STACKOVERFLOW.COM/QUESTIONS/ASK and
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask both works fine - actually the previous one is converted to lowercase.
I think that this makes sense for the user.
If I look at Google then this URL works fine:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/corporate/index.html but this one with "ABOUT" is not working:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/ABOUT/corporate/index.html Should the URL be case sensitive?
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Stick to one version: The lowercase pattern is recommended (because there will always be people who will link to this more traditional version). Use 301 redirects: If you see URLs with capital letters get into index (someone linked to it or you changed your content management system and it capitalized some URLs).
The cases of letters in a URL absolutely do matter to Google. Two URLs could look the same, and even lead to the same content, but they could be treated as different URLs if one has a capital letter and the other doesn't.
It may surprise you but, yes, URLs are case sensitive. And, if you have both upper- and lowercase versions of your site's domain, you may be unintentionally making Google's job harder — and hurting your site's own performance.
See web addresses. web—When referring to the World Wide Web, web is not capitalized. web addresses—Also known as URLs.
As mentioned earlier, URL case-sensitivity depends on the operating system of your website’s server. If you want to make your URLs case sensitive for the different pages of your site, use a Linux or Unix-based server. But as mentioned earlier, having case sensitive URLs may cause problems later on the maintenance side.
Domain names are not case sensitive, but there are times when URLs are. This means you can enter a website’s URL in all capital letters, and it will still bring you the designated homepage, but a URL depends on the server that hosts the site and whether or not it supports different cases. What is the Difference Between a Domain Name and URL?
Google’s John Mueller clarifies that URLs are case sensitive, so it matters whether the characters are uppercase or lowercase. Variations in cases can make one URL different from another, similar to how a URL with a trailing slash is different from a URL without the slash.
In the early days URLs mapped very directly to filenames, and the files were generally on Unix-like machines, and Unix-like machines have case-sensitive filenames. So my guess is that it just happened that way for implementation convenience, and usability (for end-users) was never even considered.
According to W3's "HTML and URLs" they should:
There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn't matter, but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive.
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All “insensitive”s are boldened for readability.
Domain names are case insensitive according to RFC 4343. The rest of URL is sent to the server via the GET method. This may be case sensitive or not.
Take this page for example, stackoverflow.com receives GET string /questions/7996919/should-url-be-case-sensitive, sending a HTML document to your browser. Stackoverflow.com is case insensitive because it produces the same result for /QUEStions/7996919/Should-url-be-case-sensitive.
On the other hand, Wikipedia is case sensitive except the first character of the title. The URLs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_sensitivity and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/case_sensitivity leads to the same article, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASE_SENSITIVITY returns 404.
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