Case sensitivity and canonical urls

[Martin Atkins]

Grant Monroe wrote:
> I'm working on implementing an identity server and I've run into a
> slight problem. Our identity urls are of the form
> http://example.com/user. I would like the user to be able to type in
> example.com/user and example.com/User and have the consumer know that
> these are the same identity url, because we treat them identically on
> the server.
> I noticed someone mentioned something about a <link
> rel="openid.canonical" ... /> in another thread. Could this be a
> useful case for such a link?
> 

This doesn't directly answer your question, but you should really have
one of those redirect to the other. It's not a very good practice to
have a bunch of URLs all going to the same thing. It means that things
get listed on search engines various times and causes problems like the
one you're describing with OpenID.

If you have example.com/User redirect to example.com/user then OpenID
consumers will always use the latter, as following redirects is part of
the spec.

I think redirecting is a good best practice in general, just you'd have
mydomain.com redirect to www.mydomain.com or vice-versa. That it "fixes"
for OpenID is a nice side-effect.