Whenever I go to YouTube or any website at all, it doesn’t matter if I write the website name in lowercase letters or uppercase letters, I will land on the same website. But whenever we go to a video and even replace 1 letter with lowercase or uppercase, the link doesn’t work.
How does the URL know that one section is not case-sensitive while the other section is case-sensitive?
I can understand why that’s the case. To keep the URLs unique. just in case something similar comes up. But what’s happening behind the scenes?
In: 52
Any application can be case sensitive, or case insensitive.
* case insensitive: A equals a
* case sensitive: A does not equal a
The domain name system that lets you get to a web site is case insensitive. You will land at that domain regardless of upper or lower case. Usually the path under that domain is case insensitive because the web server is told to ignore case. Reddit paths are case sensitive, go to the privacy policy page but with a capital P, and it won’t take you there.
So let’s take this YouTube URL:
[https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=0ahfosjYz1attRmv)
(Yeah, I went there) You could type that:
[https://YOUTU.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ](https://YOUTU.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ)
And you’ll still get there because domains aren’t case sensitive.
But the jumbled letters aren’t a path, so there’s no web server case setting to make. Those letters are a publicly available ID for which video to serve up. It’s your input into the YouTube program that tells it to find that video. YouTube has decided that a video ID is a mix of upper and lower case.
Edit: Typoed wrong way
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