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authorOsmium Sorcerer <os@sof.beauty>2026-03-16 14:35:42 +0000
committerOsmium Sorcerer <os@sof.beauty>2026-04-18 16:52:22 +0000
commit8538104fd5573ba5eeade30ee4a20893224960f9 (patch)
tree61133e858ed428ce7963d5a979afe62c907e5216 /webAO/styles/chatbox
parent2ef41402209b82279656ae4b1affe6484be1ed77 (diff)
Remove toLowerCase mangling
For whatever reason, WebAO decides to normalize almost every string component in URLs, packets, and INI files to lower case. First, the glaring issue. In the URLs, this handling of paths is utterly broken and corrupts data. By mangling characters, you change the resource identity and break valid URLs. According to section 6.2.2.1 of RFC 3986 (Case Normalization): > When a URI uses components of the generic syntax, the component syntax > equivalence rules always apply; namely, that the scheme and host are > case-insensitive and therefore should be normalized to lowercase. For > example, the URI <HTTP://www.EXAMPLE.com/> is equivalent to > <http://www.example.com/>. The other generic syntax components are > assumed to be case-sensitive unless specifically defined otherwise by > the scheme (see Section 6.2.3) Scheme and host _are_ case-insensitive. Path is _not_, so isn't everything else. Section 6.2.3 doesn't define any normalization for the path component in HTTP schemes. Thus, example.com/item and example.com/Item are two different resources. I can only think of idiotic conventions of a particular poorly designed file system when it comes to this absurdity. There's no reason to drag them around in our developments. For these systems, case doesn't matter anyway, normalization is their job, not server hosts' who end up having to either rewrite every URL request for every asset, or mangle their asset directory and then rewrite almost every INI config (and spam "showname=Name" everywhere because now your character directory has to be "name"). So, instead of using absurd ad-hoc solutions to a broken implementation such as forcing everything to lower case on the server side, this commit attempts to fix the root issue and make URL handling conformant to relevant standards. Similar situation with strings within packets, although not as severe in practice. Case must be preserved, otherwise it's corrupting data for no reason. If a normalization is needed, it should be done at the call site of whatever requires it (like a filtering function), not by the parser. As for the INI, it's opinionated. While the values absolutely must not be normalized, a case can be made for keys and section names: why not allow "Options", "options", or even "oPtiOnS"? It's more convenient, and corresponds to the platform quirk of Windows (which Qt unfortunately inherits in AO2 Client). I don't think there's a good reason to allow such leniency in parsing, and removing superfluous normalization is a better move: less data transformations, less ambiguity, more strictness. In practice, INIs tend to be well-formed, and it's good discipline to write them this way. In several places, the case-folding does make sense: callwords, OOC commands, CSS class names for areas, and character list filters. These will behave weirdly and inconveniently without it. In most places, however, it only causes unnecessary breakage.
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