Month: September 2002

human-readable urls

the law of cms urls states that

The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs. Compare, for instance, StoryServer’s weird comma-delimited numeric URLs to Radio UserLand’s human-readable (and guessable) URLs. Then compare the prices – orders of magnitudes of difference. So, at least in this respect, there’s an inverse relationship between price and quality.

zope, midgard and the new postnuke are on the right path, fortunately 🙂

RSS Namespaces

it seems that adding namespaces to rss 2.0 breaks almost the whole rss infrastructure. this is a good thing, as it will lead to xml-compliant rss parsers, and since rss is probably the most popular xml application, it will drive adoption of higher-end xml functionality through the back door.

It’s all been very instructive. The bad news is that a lot of dirty laundry has been hung out. The good new is that it’s being exposed to the open air. I suspect(though I can’t prove) that RSS is the most popular, widely-used application of XML. Figuring out how to use namespaces in RSS is going to be good for the RSS community, and good for XML.

WebDAV and CMS

henri makes some interesting observations about webdav, and how they could be used in cms:

WebDAV could also be used as an interop protocol for exchanging content between different CMS systems. The problem is that there would need to be a common data model for this. Options include adopting DocBook or Zope CMF as the common data model. Having Dublin Core properties for all resources in a common namespace would also be a possibility. HTTP error codes should be used for providing information on failed or succeeded creates and updates. The DeltaV specification also defines an XML format for the body of the error reports (mgd_errstr, etc).

generating webdav views from dynamic cms content will not be without difficulties, but will lift open source cms to a whole different level.

Innovation is crucial

Far from being simply some missing factor in the growth equation, innovation is now recognized as the single most important ingredient in any modern economy – accounting for more than half of economic growth in America and Britain. In short, it is innovation more than the application of capital or labor – that makes the world go round.

finally a credible source that spells out what many naysayers fail to understand. schumpeterian destruction is very necessary for an economy to prosper. the commodization of protocols and applications ushered by open source is very much in line.