Is this bad practice - capital letters in a URL?

[curlybill09]

I have been designing a section of my website that has directories for each state of the country:

http://www.example.com/Texas/
http://www.example.com/Virginia/
etc.

Since I am on a Linux Server, and the filesystem is case-sensitive, is it bad practice to capitalize the first letter of the state name in the URL?

Is it bad practice to have uppercase letters in any part of the URL? What is the general consensus about using capital letters in a URL? Thanks for your help.

[Quadrille]

If your server is case-sensitive, it's probably not wise to increase the risk of errors.

If you proceed, do be sure to have a good, reader-friendly 404 page.

The web 'convention' is lower case; by all means be different - but understand that your risks increase.

[monkeythumpa]

Convention says to keep everything lowercase, but with proper nouns, there are bound to be people who type it the "other" way than you expected. You can't win on this one. The best solution would be to not have your file system be case sensitive. The 2nd best solution would be to redirect all uppercase letters to lowercase.

SEs are not case sensitive, so there is no SEO implications, unless your uppercase pages show 404s to the spiders.

[futureX]

imo it is bad practice, but in most cases people arent going to be using direct urls to navigate your site anyway...

[g1smd]

Having consistent case rules in a URL makes it easier for people to remember what the URL actually was. Stick with all lower-case.

Make sure that /Texas and /texas do not both return content with a 200 OK status as that is a duplicate content issue (happens all the time with people using IIS) that will cause a lot of problems.

[gibbergibber]

-- Having consistent case rules in a URL makes it easier for people to remember what the URL actually was. Stick with all lower-case.--

Definitely, people will never remember capitalisations.

Most people will remember the middle bit of a name and then stick a .com on the end of it, and that's what you should assume is the extent of their ability.

[g1smd]

Some can't even manage that fully.

They'll type that into a Google search box instead of into the address bar of their broweser....