

Ask PG: Why when I go to /CLASSIC does it show "Unknown"? - ScottWhigham

I had my caps lock on today and went to http://news.ycombinator.com/CLASSIC instead of http://news.ycombinator.com/classic and all I got was a white page saying "Unknown." I just checked and this happens with several urls (http://news.ycombinator.com/LEADERS, for example).<p>I'm a Windows guy and IIS (the Windows built-in web server) isn't case sensitive. I also don't care to search around and figure out what web server you are using (apache?). So the question is: is this by design or accident? And if it's by design, why?<p>And BTW - I don't care one whit if you fix it or don't; it doesn't affect my usability at all. I was just curious.
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jgrahamc
If you look in the source code of this site you'll discover that it doesn't
lowercase that part of the URL:

    
    
      (def parseurl (s)
        (let (type url) (tokens s)
          (let (base args) (tokens url #\?)
            (list (sym (downcase type))
                  (sym (cut base 1))
                  (if args
                      (parseargs args)
                      nil)))))
    

In fact it only calls 'downcase' on the type (which is the HTTP verb).

