History

CamelCase was the original wiki/WikiWiki convention for creating hyperlinks: A word became a link, with the link label equal to this word, and the link target being the page with that name, if it was of this form, with the additional requirement that the capitals are followed by a lower-case letter. Hence AlabamA and ABc will not be links (see WikiCase on WikiWiki). In the Wiki context, CamelCase was called WikiWord. See also CamelCase on WikiWiki.

The following do not strictly qualify as bicapitalization, but are CamelCase for the purposes of the original version of the WikiWiki software:

• AlabamA (CamelCased words need at least two components)
• aNaRcHy cAsE

Problems

CamelCasedTerms are recognized by search engine spiders and indexers as single words, thus ranking pages incorrectly (a word in the URL generally rates a page as related to that word). Separating words (using hyphens between words in local paths or in DNS names; underscore is invalid for DNS names) addresses this. Removing case sensitivity from links also allows use of tools such as Apache's mod_speling, and easier guessing of URLs by people.

See also

• Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia