6 ms·

Cool URIs Don't change

33 points by Bluem00 18y ago

Bluem00 18y ago
I just noticed that this classic piece of advice has never been directly posted to HN. I think that giving "things" a name is one of the hard problems that programmers tackle every day. Normally our success or failure at choosing good names is kept hidden, and can only be seen by those who look at our code. Websites are one of the rare places where the world at large has to deal with our mistakes.
- AndyKelley 18y ago
  Good link. While it is often impractical to keep all the URIs working, it sure would be nice if they were.
- michaelneale 18y ago
  Yes - until we get an internet wide refactoring option: "Apply this change to the entire freaking internet?" y/N>
TheWama 18y ago
+1 for content negotiation. Extension-less URLs are just plain sexy.
- simonw 18y ago
  Extension-less URLs are great, but I'm not a fan of content negotiation. I like to be able to copy and paste a URL to someone and know that they are going to retrieve the same piece of content as I did. I don't like language negotiation for the same reason - if someone finds a typo on my French language site and sends me a link to the page but I see it in English I won't know what they're talking about.
  - bct 18y ago
    That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not completely convinced that those are real problems. If you send someone a content-negotiated URL you can be pretty confident that they'll see the text/html (or application/xhtml+xml :-) version). Similarly, any typo report more specific than "there's a typo somewhere at this URL" will tell you what you need to know.
brlewis 18y ago
Unfortunately, search engine optimization is moving people to put even more topic-related words in URLs than they did 10 years ago when this was written.
snorkel 18y ago
At least make urls all lower case. Consider how tedious it is spell out a url over the phone which happens quite often. "... dot com forward slash u s e r ... no, capital U on user ... upper case U ... user is upper case U ... no, the rest of user is lower case ...after the slash ... the forward slash... I'll start again..."
- dmoney 18y ago
  Case-sensitivity was a cruel joke.

33 points by Bluem00 18y ago

I just noticed that this classic piece of advice has never been directly posted to HN. I think that giving "things" a name is one of the hard problems that programmers tackle every day. Normally our success or failure at choosing good names is kept hidden, and can only be seen by those who look at our code. Websites are one of the rare places where the world at large has to deal with our mistakes.

AndyKelley 18y ago
Good link. While it is often impractical to keep all the URIs working, it sure would be nice if they were.
michaelneale 18y ago
Yes - until we get an internet wide refactoring option: "Apply this change to the entire freaking internet?" y/N>

TheWama 18y ago

+1 for content negotiation. Extension-less URLs are just plain sexy.

simonw 18y ago
Extension-less URLs are great, but I'm not a fan of content negotiation. I like to be able to copy and paste a URL to someone and know that they are going to retrieve the same piece of content as I did. I don't like language negotiation for the same reason - if someone finds a typo on my French language site and sends me a link to the page but I see it in English I won't know what they're talking about.
- bct 18y ago
  That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not completely convinced that those are real problems. If you send someone a content-negotiated URL you can be pretty confident that they'll see the text/html (or application/xhtml+xml :-) version). Similarly, any typo report more specific than "there's a typo somewhere at this URL" will tell you what you need to know.

brlewis 18y ago

Unfortunately, search engine optimization is moving people to put even more topic-related words in URLs than they did 10 years ago when this was written.

snorkel 18y ago

At least make urls all lower case. Consider how tedious it is spell out a url over the phone which happens quite often. "... dot com forward slash u s e r ... no, capital U on user ... upper case U ... user is upper case U ... no, the rest of user is lower case ...after the slash ... the forward slash... I'll start again..."

dmoney 18y ago
Case-sensitivity was a cruel joke.