In the computer world, special characters can have a certain usefulness or can be a hindrance. The very first special character I learnt 25 years ago, was the colon. It was ( still is ) used as the delimiter to change drive letters in DOS.
eg. if you were in drive C and wanted to go to drive D, you would type:
d:
Simple? Yes
But not always so. Because of the special intent of certain characters, using them in a non-content fashion can be problematic ( sometimes catastrophic ).
What do I mean by non-content? Well consider a document – the text in the document is the content and the title of the document is ( part of ) the metadata or non-content.
System administrators or programmers will know that #! has special meaning. If you want to use it in a non-content fashion, you have to take extra steps. If you don’t, you may not get the result you expect.
This brings to mind a recent story from a colleague. A client had gone to a web development firm to ask about pricing for a web site. Not having done anything similar before, they got quite a shock when the quote was presented.
The client decided to look for other avenues and ended up doing the site themselves using an online templating service. It was a reasonable site but had many links and pages, and was a bit complex. Nevertheless, the client then approached an SEO firm ( search engine optimisation ) to make sure that the site was successful from a search and marketing point of view.
But the site never appeared in search results at all. The client was quite upset with the SEO firm but after much troubleshooting the SEO firm determined the issue was not with them. So the client asked my colleague to take a look and he found the issue: the client had prefixed all page titles on the site with #! – those in the know understand that this means “Do not index this site under any circumstances!” And so the search engines blissfully ignored the site.
And so the client had to go back and re-title around 300 web pages – quite a bit of not-so-enjoyable work.
It often occurs that someone is not happy with the pricing of a service but there might be a very good reason for that pricing – the service provider has experience and understands the ins and outs of their industry. That experience costs money and is of value. Doing things yourself can sometimes end up costing you more in the end.
Not to digress, special characters should be avoided at all cost. Do NOT use them!!!
My philosophy is to only use lower case and no special characters at all, especially when naming things. Keep it simple.