On the dash

[Spudhead]

A colleague has suggested that, for SEO purposes, it might be advisable to seperate words in filenames with dashes rather than the initial caps convention we've always used, eg: "property-details.asp" rather than "propertyDetails.asp"

Another has suggested that it would be best to use an underscore in place of a dash, but couldn't quite remember why.

The voice in my head is muttering about it not making a blind bit of difference.

Who should I listen to? :confused:

[pb&j]

*listen to the little voices in your head*

AFAIK, it should not make a difference. i have done the caps thing but prefer to use the underscore.

[bcarl314]

I would go with the underscore verses the dash. It wasn't until recently that the dash was an acceptable "word" character in file names. Used to be only [a-zA-Z0-9_] which were (and still are) always acceptable in file names. Other symbols (&,.?-) etc are not word characters, and may cause problems on legacy systems.

My vote, forget the dash, and use the underscore.

[Roy Sinclair]

The dash may make it look like you're trying to perform math on the file name, stick with underscore or camel casing as you were doing before this suggestion first came up.