Talking ’Bout URIs

Consistent web identification seems to be the topic of the day; observe posts by Gordon Weakliem and Christian Stocker. By chance my own experiences allow me to contribute to this discussion.

Late last night on our usual weblog I mocked The Village Voice in an entry titled Shaw ’Nuff, complete with that copied-and-pasted right single quote (doubling here as an apostrophe). I finished the entry, hit publish, then ambled over to the main page and hovered over some links. That’s when I saw this permanent link:

mikemariano.com/weblog/2006/01/04/shaw-%e2%80%99nuff/

Gyah!

Rather than stripping the apostrophe, WordPress had masticated it into an undigested, percent-encoded nightmare!

There’s nothing cool about that URI, so I immediately committed a web no-no and changed the Post Slug to shaw-nuff. As far as I know, though, the dark magic of Ping-o-matic (or is it now Ping-o-mattic?) had already sent the mangled link far across the Web, so I added a permanent redirect in .htaccess.

I was surprised; we no longer live in the WordPress dark ages. Authors can no longer fall into the same trap Eric Meyer did fifteen months ago. I use cites, ems, and apostrophes in my titles all the time, and WordPress 1.5.2 never lets me down.

But contracting “enough� as “’nuff� was too much for the program to handle. And barring my emergency surgery, George Bernard Shaw would have one ugly link.

Do you think WordPress MU/2.0 has corrected this problem? Only one way to find out….