3 ms·

You and I both, especially since it's a repost http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230768 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230768

jacquesm 16y ago
Good catch, the dupe checker didn't catch it because of the 'blog' in the original link.
shawndrost 16y ago
It's a great discussion. Although URLs work quite well, they are not uniform[1], do not necessarily represent resources[2], and are used for other purposes than location[3]. Thus, there is room for both sides to be right: usually, you should treat a URL as everyone else does, but sometimes, it's smarter not to. [1] What is uniform about them? They mean different things, depending on the context in which they are accessed. http://experts-exchange.com/whatever http://experts-exchange.com/whatever returns different content, depending on your user-agent, your /etc/hosts, your firewalls and network filters, and so on. Granted, they satisfy a strict technical sense of the word "uniform", but that meaning shouldn't be conflated with its english meaning, as it is in this article. [2] "Unlike many URLs, the mailto scheme does not represent a data object to be accessed directly." Section 3.5, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt [3] The ":password" part of many protocols is authentication, not location.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  [1] experts-exchange is abusing the urls, the fact that they are not 'rest-ful' does not detract from the URL scheme but from experts-exchange. [2] Mailto is a URI, not a URL. 1738 has long been superseded. http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/modern_mailto_uri_scheme.html http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/modern_mailto_u... So, that leaves '3', which is not exactly secure and most applications that can use it will also happily ask for a password from the user in interactive mode when it isn't supplied.

jacquesm 16y ago

Good catch, the dupe checker didn't catch it because of the 'blog' in the original link.

shawndrost 16y ago

It's a great discussion. Although URLs work quite well, they are not uniform[1], do not necessarily represent resources[2], and are used for other purposes than location[3]. Thus, there is room for both sides to be right: usually, you should treat a URL as everyone else does, but sometimes, it's smarter not to. [1] What is uniform about them? They mean different things, depending on the context in which they are accessed. http://experts-exchange.com/whatever http://experts-exchange.com/whatever returns different content, depending on your user-agent, your /etc/hosts, your firewalls and network filters, and so on. Granted, they satisfy a strict technical sense of the word "uniform", but that meaning shouldn't be conflated with its english meaning, as it is in this article. [2] "Unlike many URLs, the mailto scheme does not represent a data object to be accessed directly." Section 3.5, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt [3] The ":password" part of many protocols is authentication, not location.

jacquesm 16y ago
[1] experts-exchange is abusing the urls, the fact that they are not 'rest-ful' does not detract from the URL scheme but from experts-exchange. [2] Mailto is a URI, not a URL. 1738 has long been superseded. http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/modern_mailto_uri_scheme.html http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/modern_mailto_u... So, that leaves '3', which is not exactly secure and most applications that can use it will also happily ask for a password from the user in interactive mode when it isn't supplied.