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I am constantly pondering ideas how could intuitive and "cool" web without broken URLs look like, and whether mechanisms for it are or are not embraided into or
by myfonj 4y ago
I am constantly pondering ideas how could intuitive and "cool" web without broken URLs look like, and whether mechanisms for it are or are not embraided into original standards.
Farthest I got is that we probably should see two addresses where we currently see one in our URL bar: Locator and Identifier and whole web-related technology should revolve around this distinction with immutability in mind.
- On server side Locators should always respond with locations of Identifiers or other Locators. So, redirects. Caching headers makes sense here, denoting e.g. "don't even ask next five minutes".
- Content served under Identifier should be immutable. So "HTTP 200" response always contains same data. Caching headers here makes no sense at all, since the response will always be the same (or error).
In practice, navigating to https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ (locator) should always result in something like HTTP 302 to https://news.ycombinator.com/?<timestamp> https://news.ycombinator.com/?<timestamp> or any other identifier denoting unique state of the response page. Any dynamic page engine should first provide mechanism producing identifiers of any resulting response.
I feel there are some fundamental problems in this utopian concept (especially around non-anonymous access), but nevertheless would like to know if it could be viable at least in some subset current/past web.
- cxr 4y agoPURLs have been a thing for a while. And while rel="canonical", on the other hand, is a frighteningly recent invention relatively speaking, it does exist.