On May 3, 2006, at 4:49 PM, Allen Gilliland wrote:
I know what you are saying and part of my mind wants to agree, but
ultimately I still have to say "yes" .html is an implementation
detail. A url is meant to point to a resource and that's it, how
that resource is defined is an implementation detail.
Also, there are plenty of reasons why a single resource (URL)
should be available in multiple content types. That is seldom used
these days, but it makes a lot of sense. Along the same lines
there is the somewhat crazy example of, "what if XX years from now
you want that same url to return something other than HTML?"
That's a very good point.
I know it is hard to break the habit of wanting to use file
extensions and I admit that I like them for a lot of reasons as
well, but at the end of the day I don't think a .html or .xml file
extension will buy us anything in our urls. I find it more likely
that it will only impose some limitations.
It's not hard to break a habit you never had. Roller has never used
them.
To put it another way, if the urls work fine without the file
extensions when why should we add them?
I think static blog generation is the only reason to use them.
I don't know if the absence of extensions makes static generation
impossible or not. I suspect that static generation is possible
without extensions, but extensions should make things easier. Why?
Because the static files can simply be dumped in a web server and,
because of the extensions, the web server will set the right content-
type headers.
Allen pointed out that, if we decide to generate blogs statically, we
can add extensions to only the statically generated files. But in the
case where you are starting with a dynamic blog and converting it to
a static blog that would not work. You'd break all of the permalinks
to your old blog, since your old blog had no extensions and now your
new blog does.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that, in order to scale up to
hundreds of thousands or millions of blogs, we'll have go static. I'd
hate that because I love the dynamic nature of Roller. Maybe
conventional wisdom is wrong and maybe I'm worried about a problem
we'll never have to solve.
- Dave
