Hyphen, underscore, or camelCase as word delimiter in URIs?

Question

I\'m designing an HTTP-based API for an intranet app. I realize it\'s a pretty small concern in the grand scheme of things, but: should I use hyphens, underscores, o

Answer 1

You should use hyphens in a crawlable web application URL. Why? Because the hyphen separates words (so that a search engine can index the individual words), and is not a word character. Underscore is a word character, meaning it should be considered part of a word.

Double-click this in Chrome: camelCase
Double-click this in Chrome: under_score
Double-click this in Chrome: hyphen-ated

See how Chrome (I hear Google makes a search engine too) only thinks one of those is two words?

camelCase and underscore also require the user to use the shift key, whereas hyphenated does not.

So if you should use hyphens in a crawlable web application, why would you bother doing something different in an intranet application? One less thing to remember.