Should t tags be set to all lowercase?

[fishcharlie]

I'm not seeing anything about if t (hashtag) tags content should be lowercase or not? It seems like some clients I'm looking at are setting them to all lowercase. One project I built doesn't modify it from the original input. But I can't figure out if that is incorrect or not.

Or, is it the relays responsibility to return filtered t content that is case-insensitive?

[vitorpamplona]

There is no rule, but in Amethyst we always add the original case and lowercase and when we filter, we always filter for both too.

[fiatjaf]

I think we could say they should always be lowercase. That would simplify things.

[fishcharlie]

I agree with this. And based on the comments here, it sounds like there is agreement around that. I'd be more than happy to submit a PR proposal to document that. That way more discussion can be had in a more formal setting. However, I just looked and I can't find which NIP I should document this under. Or if it should just be part of the README? Any insight into where this should be documented?

[fiatjaf]

I think you can add a new section on NIP-24, I see that as "the grab-bag of soft-standards" NIP.

[fishcharlie]

@fiatjaf Perfect. I'll look into that when I get a chance and submit a PR so we can get some more formal feedback.

[alexgleason]

Relays should ideally return case-insensitive results for tag filters. I think clients should preserve their case, so #SusanAlbumParty doesn't become #susanalbumparty

[fiatjaf]

The tag text in the content is independent from the t tag.

[alexgleason]

Oh right.

[scsibug]

I'd rather not special-case any behavior for "#t" tags. Everything else is exact string match, t should be the same. Clients should either agree to use lowercase, or preserve the case as stored.

[fabianfabian]

Agree it should be lowercased, when implementing tags I was surprised this wasn't the case and the solution to overload with all tag variants (which im reluctantly doing now) is unnecessary if all clients can agree to just do lowercase (create and query).

[jb55]

damus lowercases hashtags when adding the tag, it's the only sane thing to do.

[fishcharlie]

I think it also does when viewing/tapping on a tag? At least that is the conclusion I came to through my investigation.

I agree with this. I hope we can get this documented here, since it seems like there is agreement here. I messed this up when I was working on another nostr project.

[staab]

I also prefer lowercase, however @alexgleason has a point that information is lost. It's helpful for readability to allow users looking through a list of topics to be able to read them as originally formatted, for example "MyLongTopic". Lowercasing requires clients to pull the topic's casing from content to get the correct casing. I think worth it, but something to consider.

[fishcharlie]

@staab This is a really interesting perspective. One thing I've wanted from social applications that implement hash tags is a way to have a brief summary of what the hashtag is/represents. I see hashtags sometimes, that are abbreviations or something, and even after reading through a lot of posts I still can't understand what it means.

Sadly, I don't have a really solid idea yet of how to do that in a non centralized way. You could of course use a ranking and voting system, where people submit a summary of hashtags, and the highest rankings are shown. But not sure if that is the ideal way to go about it. Needs some more thought.

Reason I bring that up tho, is if you have summaries for hashtags in a system like that, it would be possible to correct capitalization in that system, as well as even adding spaces. #asknostr in a post becomes Ask nostr, with a summary of the hashtag.

Now, again. Lots of problems and things to think through. And I'm not even sure it's a good idea. But it's something I've been thinking about.

But at that point you are almost rebuilding a system like Wikipedia. Which built on top of a platform like nostr, would be incredibly cool, and have a lot of benefits. Lots of possibilities to consider.