i try to follow my org chart as well as not putting any wacky URL names to prevent ugliness. look at MS article scid=905231

No spaces.............................

yeah, most definitely. http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp avoid these characters at all costs or you might hear employees actually using "just go to the WSS under sales percent twenty operations site".

if you are a large org, let me suggest the following:

We have 12 geographic sites and each has it's own CIO. To overcome this inital site  conflict, we did the following:

Create a managed path for each large area or division (ignore if you are small or don't have multiple large divisions/areas)

portal.foo.us/Chicago/CIO
portal.foo.us/Atlanta/CIO

Then corp/agency wide sites use the standard site structure portal.foo.us/sites/whatever

I can't see the content at this URL right now but the key thing that I
like to prevent users from using is spaces. So, I just wrote a simple
JavaScript override that I drop into the custom ows.js of my custom site
definitions that strip out all spaces that user's inevitably put in when
they name things. This way, you technically guarantee that they don't
use spaces.

I'm in the process of producing a style guide for my company, this whole area of naming  sites to a given standard has produced mixed feelings within my IT department. Software developers say we should go for a Camel approach, while I say we should go for all lower case. Coming from a usability angle and following what Jacob Neilson says on this subject, which is "use all lowercase characters. If you use MiXeD cAse, some users are guaranteed to forget some of the caps and get errors". Then there is the issue of special characters should we allow the use of underscores and hyphens to split words. Everybody has a different opinion on this subject. I know SPS does not allow the use of certain characters, as it uses them internally but I don't have a defacto list, does anybody know were I can find this?

I am confused by two things…

First, why is the naming  of sites so important to your organization? If you’re letting users create  their own sites, isn’t the ease of use of those URLs something that they have to contend with?

Second, Why are you concerned about capitalization? IIS will ignore capitalization by default. So whether you enter http://server/MYSITE or http://server/mysite -- it will go to the same place.

I don't have it with me. But, I'll try to recreate it here.

The following JavaScript on the newsbweb.aspx admin page is used to
remove leading spaces and trailing spaces.

function stripWS(str)
{
var b = 0;
var e = str.length;
while (str.charAt(b) && (Visascii(str.charAt(b)) &&
Visspace(str.charAt(b))))
b++;
while ((b < e) && (Visascii(str.charAt(e-1)) &&
Visspace(str.charAt(e-1))))
e--;
return ((b>=e)?"":str.substring(b, e ));
}

I converted this function to a much simpler replace function to globally
replace all the spaces with an empty string using a regular expression.
From memory and untested, it looked something like this:

function stripAllWS(str)
{
return str.replace(/ /g, "");
}

Then, I replaced the call to stripWS with stripAllWS and user cannot add
new Subwebs with spaces in them. In addition to being much more
efficient than the original function, this new function could do far
more to enforce a naming  convention than just trim spaces.


A similar approach can be used on the newFld.aspx admin page and others.
However, instead of calling a local js function, this page calls into
the ows.js TrimSpaces function. Both of these owj.js functions can be
rewritten to include more efficient and conditional logic and be placed
into your custom site  definition's CustomJsUrl file.

function TrimSpaces( str )
{
var start;
var end;
str = str.toString();
var len = str.length;
for (start = 0; start < len; start ++)
{
if (str.charAt(start) != ' ')
break;
}
if (start == len)
return "";
for (end = len - 1; end > start; end --)
{
if (str.charAt(end) != ' ')
break;
}
end ++;
return str.substring(start, end);
}

function TrimWhiteSpaces( str )
{
var start;
var end;
str = str.toString();
var len = str.length;
for (start = 0; start < len; start ++)
{
ch = str.charAt(start);
if (ch!=' ' && ch!='\t' && ch!='\n' && ch!='\r' && ch!='\f')
break;
}
if (start == len)
return "";
for (end = len - 1; end > start; end --)
{
ch = str.charAt(end);
if (ch!=' ' && ch!='\t' && ch!='\n' && ch!='\r' && ch!='\f')
break;
}
end ++;
return str.substring(start, end);
}

Test well. I haven't researched this today to be certain that these are
the right/best functions. They just stuck in my head as being the ones
that I overrode to obtain the functionality that I was looking for.

A style guide is just that, a guide. If you are truly concerned about URL naming, then you need to bring that process in house and create  sites for your users. You can't utlimately control what they use, only "guide" them.

You can control them with code. Replace the pages that users use to
create stuff with pages that give them limited options based explicitly
on internal standards. The must then follow the conventions or the
create page will not continue.

your request for characters that cant be used in sharepoint:

support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=905231