Hey - as the person who developed the URL stuff for the programme
information pages project (PIPs - hence pip in the URL), I can assure
you that the one you're proposing is not generally better.
The problem with the date formatted stuff is that it only works if
you know for certain that the programme in question will never ever
be repeated. And—of course—even in the case of specific daily
programmes like BBC breakfast you can't be absolutely certain that's
the case. Fairly recently the BBC rebroadcast the entire news
broadcasts in real time of the D-Day Landings (I think), which would
mean that the programme in question would suddenly get two URLs.
Two URLs means that the programme itself is not unquely identifiable
in any way, which is very bad. It means that if people in the world
wanted to refer to that programme and you wanted to aggregate all the
comments around them in one place, or bring it all together in a
useful web of data, then you couldn't. Every piece of data associated
with a different date-based URL would be hidden from you.
It gets worse when you start thinking about programmes that might be
put out twice in the same day - for example, the weather forecast,
news bulletins—or for a show that's broadcast at 9pm on BBC One and
then repeated at 11pm on BBC Three (or the other way around).
We even thought about going into more depth with things like dates of
original broadcast as the definitive URL. But that creates huge
problems in itself. For a start, you don't necessarily KNOW the
initial date of broadcast. And if you do, then it's still not easily
guessable and may even be confusing to the person who comes along
twenty years later when the programme is rebroadcast. It's all highly
tricky.
The big confusion here comes, i think, in thinking that TV schedules
are the best ways to identify TV programmes. For a start, as time
passes, TV schedules are only likely to get less relevant, programmes
will be repeated more and more and then finally the idea of a
programme being 'broadcast' is likely to seem ridiculous and old-
fashioned. How do you then create a URL for the programme?
We're used to date formatted stuff making sense in things like
weblogs because they are in fact created on a day and that context is
significant and important. It gives you sub directories that you can
usefully hack back through as well, but what would that mean in the
case of TV shows? Show me all programmes that were *created* or
*broadcast* in the day / week / month in question? It gets really
weird and tricky.
The artist based stuff in music is a bit different and slightly
harder to justify, although you could argue that it's quite easy for
a band or an artist to change their name (for example Prince). I
wouldn't push that one too hard though, it seems like an easier case
in which—at first glance at least—I'd probably agree with you.
There's a lot more I could say here (about episodes needing to be
merged and de-duped and what that entails, particularly
retrospectively, and also about using episode identifiers at the end
of URLs as a way to deal with 404 errors and the like) but I've
probably spouted enough.
Needless to say there was a lot of thought that went into the URLs
and I would be VERY cautious about changing them unless you've got a
REALLY good reason (bearing in mind that the whole point of a URL is
to be stable!)
Tom
On 14 Jul 2007, at 20:30, James Cridland wrote:
Wha? Huh? Eh?
But now you've woken me up - I (as others are in here) am a big fan
of human-readable URLs.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/breakfast/pip/jrjen/ - good.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/breakfast/archive/07/07/10/ - better.
The 'jrjen' in this URL (no idea, but I suspect it's an internal ID
for the PIP system) isn't easily guessable. A date (in this case, a
backwards one) is more guessable.
Another example (from the same area):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/x9qv/ - good
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/elton_john/ - better
Of course, other benefits are that Google will love these URLs more.
Having said that, after five days I'm understanding the reasons for
why the URLs currently work the way they do. And I think it might
be partially my job to fix that. Just hoping nobody notices quite yet.
(In other news, on Friday I found Matt Cashmore's desk. But he
wasn't in. I left him a bizarre sticky note on his monitor, though.)
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