First, the issue that I have described is not cosmetic…the current behavior of Netlify’s Production Download of a deploy is not the same code that was deployed. The website code that I extract from the Netlify Production download does not work because the HTML code cannot find the files because Netlify changed the file names. Normally, that is considered a bug.
I respectfully disagree that this is a controversial topic. The World Wide Web works because of universally agreed upon standards enshrined in RFCs found at W3C. The W3C page on URL standards (HTML and URLs) specifically says
“URLs in general are case-sensitive (with the exception of machine names). There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn’t matter, but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive.”
and even has an example demonstrating a mixed-case URL
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html4/cover.html
Also in another post (Is there any way to make _redirects case-insensitive? - #2 by hrishikesh) Netlify Support person Hrishikesh says
“URLs are case-sensitive for anything after the domain name”
Does Netlify really intend to violate the HTTP specification that says the path component of a URL (which includes filenames) is considered case-sensitive?
It is all very baffling…perhaps someone can explain why Netlify changes file names in the Production Deploy Download file, but not change the file names that are actually deployed to production? Why are the two deploys different?
I’m genuinely confused as to why Netlify is changing file names. Would love to know the reason.
mike