blank in url

Any problems with it

[guitaristinus]

I'm making a huge site and I'd like to save time by just leaving blanks between words in the page names. I know this doesn't look as nice when the browser interprets it as %20 and I'm not concerned about it effecting ranking in search engines. But will some browsers not understand it or some search engines not spider the page?

Also, I edit with Front Page and it automatically puts %20 between the words in the links to the pages. Should I just leave them or take them out?

Thanks.

[Saltminer]

Spaces in filenames are a gift from Windows, other operating systems don't allow it, thus the need to fill it with %20 the character code for a space.

Why not use a "-". It will be acceptable across all operating systems, and search engines translate the "-" as a space so your file names are still composed of "individual" words.

Jimmy

[py9jmas]

Spaces in filenames are a gift from Windows, other operating systems don't allow it,

Not true. UNIX have had spaces in filenames far longer than Windows, for instance.

thus the need to fill it with %20 the character code for a space.

The RFC for URLs (RFC 1738) states what characters are allowed in URLs. All other characters have to be encoded with the %xx notation. Spaces arn't allowed. They have to be encoded as %20. Spaces arn't allowed because:

The space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant aces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs.

[Saltminer]

Please enlighten me as to which *nix's accept spaces in the filename. I'd like to know.

Jimmy

[jtbell]

I've used Data General Unix (DG/UX), SunOS (Solaris), and Mac OS X, and they all accept blank spaces in file names. You just have to enclose such a file name in quotes when using it in a shell command, so the shell doesn't consider it to be a series of separate file names or tokens:

mv "my file" "copy of my file"