FP: Uppercase Links to Files Are Broken Publishing to UNIX Server

When you publish Web content that contains uppercase links from a Windows- based personal computer to a Web server that resides on UNIX, the links may break.

Windows-based computers perform case-insensitive compares when resolving URLs, while UNIX-based servers perform case-sensitive compares. URLs by definition are case-sensitive, so the UNIX systems apply them literally, while Windows-based Web servers make a reasonable simplification.

To resolve this problem, make your links relative to the case of the directories where the links point.

For instance, if you make a relative link to an image in your Web called Picture.gif, and you enter the URL: IMAGES/picture.gif, this link will work properly for Web servers on Windows. If you publish this Web to a UNIX Web Server, the link will appear broken when browsing to it. This is because the URL points to "IMAGES" and the actual folder is named (lower case) "images."

In this situation, you would need to modify the URL: images/picture.gif so that "images" matches the case of the directory on the UNIX Web server. The other option is to change the case of the images folder on the UNIX Web server to "IMAGES."

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.