> For that matter, even if you were limited to plain keyboard ASCII, you could have two really long filenames that only differ in one character, which are effectively indistinguishable without massive hair-pulling.
My initial response was to not present confusing data to the user, but then I thought of exactly this. In many fonts, lowercase "L" (l) and uppercase "i" (I) look the same. I'm sure in some fonts they actually are identical, rather than just being nearly indistinguishable to the human eye.
To the discussion is not about whether we should present confusing identifiers to users, but at what point if it becomes more common does it cause enough of a problem to be a bad choice, and what techniques are there to mitigate it?
My initial response was to not present confusing data to the user, but then I thought of exactly this. In many fonts, lowercase "L" (l) and uppercase "i" (I) look the same. I'm sure in some fonts they actually are identical, rather than just being nearly indistinguishable to the human eye.
To the discussion is not about whether we should present confusing identifiers to users, but at what point if it becomes more common does it cause enough of a problem to be a bad choice, and what techniques are there to mitigate it?