Titles

The difference between a page name and a page title

Although we use the terms "page name" and "page title" interchangeably, there is a subtle but potentially important difference. The bottom line is: avoid using fancy characters in page titles, i.e. characters other than letters, numbers, space and hyphen, and keep titles short (20 characters). Long titles and titles with fancy characters are not illegal, but they may get you into trouble.

Now for the details, if you're interested:

The page title is the text that shows up at the top of the page when it is displayed. The page title is also used to create a link to a page, by enclosing it in double brackets (see links). The page title can contain any character in the ISO-Latin-1 character set (also known as ISO-8859-1).

The page name is the name used by the server to store the file on disk and to refer to it in a URL. Because some characters are illegal or cause problems in file names and in URLs, the page name may not be exactly the same as the page title. Here is how a page title is converted into a page name:

spaces are replaced by underscores (_);
non-ASCII characters (e.g. letters with accents such as é) are replaced by their closest ASCII character (e.g. unaccentuated version such as e);
any character other than a letter (a-z and A-Z), a number (0-9), an underscore (_), an hypen (-), a plus sign (+) and an equal sign (=) are removed;
the text is converted to lower-case;
the text is truncated to 25 characters.

This means that different titles can correspond to the same page name and therefore to the same page. For example:

my page and my_page
été and ete
formatting (sample) and formatting sample
Wiki and wiki
a rather pretty long title for a page and a rather pretty long title for another page

When you insert a link in a page, the text of the link is converted into a page name by the above transformations. If the page does not exist, clicking the link willreturn the page creation form. The title of the page will be set to the text of the link with the first letter capitalized. Once created, a page title cannot be changed because this will break existing links to this page. To delete a page, the best method is to change its category, e.g. to "Trash" (see categories).

So, in short, if you don't want to get into trouble, stick to short titles (which are easier to use anyway) with alpha-numeric characters, spaces and hyphens. This will make it easier for others to reference your page.

Version 1, Tue 24 Nov 1998 09:02:01 [mbl]