Tag: url

Linking

The trouble with the Web is that like everything else, per Sturgeon’s Revelation, 90% of it is crap. In particular, a lot of institutional sites are pathetic self-serving fluff served up in anodyne marketing-speak with horrible URIs that are apt to vanish. Linking to the Wikipedia instead is tempting, and I’ve succumbed a lot recently. In fact, that’s what I did for the Canada Line. After all, the train is still under construction and there’s no real reason to expect today’s links to last; on top of which, the Line’s own site is mostly about selling the project to the residents and businesses who (like me) are getting disrupted by it, and the taxpayers who (like me) are paying for it. Wikipedia entries, on the other hand, are typically in stable locations, have a decent track record for outliving transient events, are pretty good at presenting the essential facts in a clear, no-nonsense way, and tend to be richly linked to relevant information, including whatever the “official” Web site might currently happen to be.

why linking to wikipedia often wins over pathetic originals

The use of Metadata in URIs

This finding addresses several questions regarding Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Specifically, what information about a resource can or should be embedded in its URI? What metadata can be reliably determined from a URI, and in what circumstances is it appropriate to rely on the correctness of such information? In what circumstances is it appropriate to use information from a URI as a hint as to the nature of a resource or its representations? Simple examples are used to explain the tradeoffs involved in employing such metadata in URIs.

a TAG finding on good URI design

URI Templating

not sure yet how this is relevant, but it is backed by people i trust with webarch

The idea behind URI templates is blindingly simple. There are lots of conventions that people use to denote the variable parts of URIs; one of them is to use {brackets}. All that we’ve done is codify that practice (brackets are a good choice because they’re not allowed in URIs, so there isn’t much risk of collision).

2007-07-28: hopefully leading to more REST hygiene in internet systems

optimizing urls for google

certainly of interest to open source cms (some of which have horrible urls) is this article by Brice Dunwoodie

More specifically, Google will parse and underscore literally and will parse a dash as a “token”, that represents white space. So if you construct a URL that contains “enterprise_content_management” in it, Google literally sees the word “enterprise_content_management”, which is really not a word at all.

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 🙂