David M Johnson wrote:
*snip*
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 agree, I think that would be the only reason I can think of as well.
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.
Correct. This is merely a detail about how the webserver determines the
content type for a given chunk of content. To me a file extension is
really just a content type hack used by file systems.
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.
That's not exactly what I said. What I meant is that Apache (and other
servers) are happy to do mappings like this for you ...
/<weblog>/entry/<anchor> --> /<weblog>/entry/<anchor>.html
Hell, with Apache and a lot of other servers the physical layout doesn't
even have to resemble the virtual layout at all. It will happily allow
this if you properly define the right mapping rules ...
/<weblog>/entry/<anchor> -->
/weblog_content/entries/<weblog>/<anchor>.html
or whatever else you want to come up with.
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.
I was part of that camp of thinking a while ago as well, but to be
honest, I am not really convinced of that anymore. It will probably be
easier and more cost effective to run a site statically rather than
invest in potentially greater infrastructure to run dynamically.
However, with the right amount of infrastructure and planning I think
Roller could support an unlimited number of blogs all running the way
they do now and that gives us XXX times more power to do cool things
than any static site ever will.
-- Allen
- Dave
