> Bearing in mind that I create ugly URIs as often as
> anyone, that I am simply answering a question, and that I
> don't want to pick on someone else's work:
> (1) URIs should describe the resource they identify, not
> the technology used to create it. (Data persists, but
> technology changes.) So ideally, .cfm and .html file
> extensions are no-nos.
I suppose that could be considered an ideal... Though I'm not sure why
it's such an issue (unless you have a significant reason to want to
make people guess what you're using or to appear unbiased toward any
given technology)... First, the extension may not have anything to do
with the technology in use, since the webserver is responsible for
determining what server engine executes which pages, so I can have my
whole site done up with .aspx files and run ColdFusion on the back
end. Second, even assuming I'm using shared hosting and don't have
access to make changes to the web server, or even with the largest
sites, I could perform a case-insensitive multi-file regex search for
"\.cfm[^[:alnum:]]" and find all the places where I would change the
extension if I were to migrate to another technology.
(Though as a rule I think migrating between technologies with existing
sites or products when not absolutely required is foolish. Imho in
most cases you start contemplating migrating to another technology
when there's no community support for the current tech 5 yrs after the
only manufacturer goes out of business. Unlike Baylor Hospital here
locally who decided to spontaneously migrate large numbers of large,
functional ColdFusion applications on their intranet to ASP.NET and
C#. I decided not to interview for the job because the recruiter was a
jerk to me when I talked to him. Pablo ended up working on that
project and said I was probably better off.)
> (3) Speaking of length... that's a long URI, which will
> all-too-often be mangled when passed around in email.
Yea, that's an important thing... My CMS has pretty short urls, even
after redirection... the products page on my own site for instance:
http://www.turnkey.to/79.cfm No it's not very descriptive, but it
works pretty well, and you can always create stubs for important
pages. Not every page on a site needs to be ranked highly on search
engines.
> Having said all of that, thre are valid reasons to
> dispense with any of the above principles in a given
> situation, and no one is a Bad Person for doing so. But
> it's all worth bearing in mind as you develop.
Yep, thanks Roger, there was some good stuff in there that hadn't
occurred to me.
s. isaac dealey 214-823-9345
team macromedia volunteer http://www.macromedia.com/go/team
chief architect, tapestry cms http://products.turnkey.to
onTap is open source http://www.turnkey.to/ontap
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