Why are Github project document page urls case sensitive? What are the negative effects?

Question

I Just uploaded a sample index.html page for my github project repo gh-pages branch. However it seems the url used to access the documentation is case sensitive. The correct url is as follows,

http://harindaka.github.com/ASPTokenInput/

However if I use the same url in lowercase github displays a page not found message. i.e.

http://harindaka.github.com/asptokeninput/

1. Why is the URL case sensitive?
2. Will this negatively affect search engine visibility and browser caching etc.?
3. What are the disadvantages/advantages of a case sensitive url approach?
4. Does this mean some other project can have the same name and url in a different case on github? (shivers :-O)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you have a personal github page (username.github.io), you can create a folder inside this repository with your project name in lowercase, and inside that folder create an index.html redirecting to original url. As example: https://github.com/MiguelPynto/MiguelPynto.github.io/tree/master/shiftdisplay

Answer 2

I am not sure this is directly related to GitHub.
The w3c standards does mention:

URLs in general are case-sensitive (with the exception of machine names).
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.

In other words, you cannot be sure what OS is behind the web server you are accessing (a case-sensitive Linux one, or not a case-sensitive one with Windows, as described in the article "Are URLs Case Sensitive?").