Do I use the Hyphens or the underscore?
Updated on 6.11.2007 (corrected typo and inserted example) Should you use hyphens or the underscore for your online website’s file names, subdirectories or in your content? Examples: your-site.com/my-files.htm or your_site.com/my_files.htm
Recently I noticed lots of hyphens being used in URLs, mostly by SEO or techie types of websites or businesses that are completely online like Amazon.com. The last few years Ive been focusing on search engines and SEO.
Read more on hyphens or underscore
It Immediately put this together. It makes so much sense that the search engine written by programmers would by smart enough to find these little details.
Ive never programmed a search engine but there are certain programming etiquette that is visible all over the web and if you’ve ever programmed, you will notice it. Examples are the hyphen versus the underscore. When writing code the computer will interpret this (FTP_Binary) a one word or phrase but it will interpret this is two words (FTP-Binary). They will NOT be understood the same way by the PC.
The underscore is read as a connector of the two words making them one word, where as the dash-hyphen is used to separate the words.
Another example of programmer syntax translating into the real world is words that start with lowercase letters and follow with a uppercase letters, like eBay. If your not a programmer and don’t know what im talking about, a good example can be seen here. Scroll down the page and you will see many code references that start with lowercase words and meet with uppercase letters pr words.
Often when declaring variables, classes and such the syntax will require names that are usually named in this manner. Other times the syntax will have names that are built in with this syntax.
