Filenames

I like complaining about the way media professionals misspeak regarding the Internet, not really understanding how it works. They'll skip the "." between the "www" and the domain name and say, "w-w-w-c-n-n-dot-com". Or they think they have to refer to a slash in a web address as a "backslash" (clearly a regular old "slash").

My other big pet peeve is putting spaces in filenames. This would've been unheard of back in the DOS days, when filenames were limited to 11 characters ('mypost10.txt', for instance) and when spaces were simply not impossible. Filenames were also not case-sensitive. But today, with long filenames, people try all sorts of crazy things, like long desriptions, complete with caps and spaces and bizarre characters. And while most technology supports long filenames, not all are fully friendly to them, most notibly web browsers and email programs.

Case in point: when you upload a file that has spaces contained in it, diffrent programs treat the spaces differently. In some cases, the space is replaced with a '%20'. But not always. In the graphic above, you see the URL, which is sent via email, is showing has a filename that clearly has a space, but the hyperlinking stops before the end of the URL, causing a click to result in an incomplete address.

We should still be using short, descriptive filenames without spaces.