Adam Christian wrote:
We need to decide whether Cosmo usernames will be case sensitive,
preserved etc.
To recap current behavior, Cosmo is case-sensitive with respect to
usernames. You can make 2 users with variations in capitalization, and
retrievals via path will fail if the URL is different than the original
capitalization of the username.
In practice, some people can get confused on real services when they
forget how the initially capitalized their username. It does happen,
and support tickets are likely to be filed.
In general, they also expect their capitalization to be preserved; they
want to be able to login with the same capitalization as what they
created, and they like to see their capitalization when the username is
returned, ala "Welcome, BoB!".
There's a lot of possible combinations of capitalization behaviors.
When you start to try to "fix" capitalization, in my experience, you
find all sorts of nooks and crannies, with differing technical
constraints. Sometimes you wind up with some performance-impacting
changes, like SQL TOUPPER across a whole database table. Seems like an
area to avoid, prior to Preview at least.
I currently favor avoiding, pre-Preview, making Cosmo be
case-insensitive everywhere. But adding a hack to avoid creating 2
users with varying capitalization should be pretty simple. This
approach would address the specific complaint:
It seems to Priscilla and I that having multiple users with the same
username no matter what the casing was confusing.
while keeping run-time capitalization checks only in the rarely-used
"create new user" code path.
At the end, we'd still have a case-sensitive Cosmo. You'd need to put
the correct path/username in Chandler's account dialog. URLs would need
to have the right capitalization in any username parts (and everywhere
else, actually). But a create-new-user would fail if an existing user
already existed with differing capitalization.
So, without analyzing all the possible combinations, this proposal is:
* Leave Cosmo as-is, except:
* Enhance CMP create-new-user to fail if a user already exists with
differing capitalization
-- Jared
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
