Re: Suggestions about URI format

Hi

On 21.8.2005 1:33 Uhr, Simon Rönnqvist wrote:
>   Hi!
> 
> The W3C suggests to "Use format negotiation to hide file extensions  in
> URIs, giving you enough flexibility to change the underlying  technology
> without too much pain." here: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/ uri-choose#id02

I know that suggestion. And I don't completely agree with it. While it's
a nice idea, the extension part of an uri is as arbitrary as for example
the directory names. Especially in Flux CMS. Meaning: If you change your
.configxml accordingly in the blog plugin,

http://blog.bitflux.ch/archive/2005/08/18/klar-wir-bilden-lehrlinge-aus.somethingelse

would work like

http://blog.bitflux.ch/archive/2005/08/18/klar-wir-bilden-lehrlinge-aus.html

and as shown with the gallery.jpg example, the extension does not
dictate the outputformat in Flux CMS.

For us, the part after the "last dot" is just to indicate to the system,
what format the user whishes and not what it actually is delivered
(having said that, the gallery.jpg stuff is really not that nice, since
it's not what one normally expects). For example if we want to output a
blog entry as PDF, how should I indicate that with the w3c suggestion?
Now I could just do:

http://blog.bitflux.ch/archive/2005/08/18/klar-wir-bilden-lehrlinge-aus.pdf

and the server will deliver PDF (if we had that integrated). Content
negotiation will not work here, as the initial  request comes from a
browser and not the pdf plugin. Putting that somewhere else in the URL
just to remove the dot would be quite silly :)

Furthermore, the other argument about content negotiation and changing
the underlying technology is also no problem with our approach. If one
day html is obsolote and we want to deliver something else, we don't
have to change the URIs as we can deliver whatever we like with any
extension in the URI. And if you change the CMS or whatever, mod_rewrite
is your friend anyway :) I completely agree with the W3C in "cool  URIs
don't change" (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) and Flux CMS comes
very close to that.

Having said all that, I'm not against making eg.

http://blog.bitflux.ch/archive/2005/08/18/klar-wir-bilden-lehrlinge-aus/

also work. I just don't have any high-priority plans for it, but patches
are always welcome :)

(one more problem with that is that currently

http://blog.bitflux.ch/archive/2005/08/18/bitflux/

shows you alle posts in the category bitflux from that day, so that
scheme is already taken somehow)

> Popoon/Cocoon is to my understanding perfect for this. So why not  drop
> all the .html and .jpg (and any other possible similar ending)  in Flux
> CMS? The blog archive uses .html which is quite allright  since it
> generates HTML, for now. ;-) But that the gallery views .jpg  in the end
> of the URI is rather misleading, since it's actually an  HTML-document.

I agree with that, but also no high prio for me...

> Apart just from agreeing with the W3C, we can also use  our common sense
> to understand that teaching our parents to remember  an URI is easier if
> it doesn't have any (to them)  cryptic .html/.something in the end.

Do you actually tell anyone an concrete page over the phone or similar?
"Just go to blog dot bitflux dot ch slash archive slash 2005 slash 08
slash 18 klar dash wir dash .. dot html" ? :) It's more like "Go to
blog.bitflux.ch and search for "lehrlinge" in the livesearch box" Or you
send a link via email, where you just click on it. So that argument
doesn't really hold. Furthermore, with static pages, you can already
have pages without .html (just make collections for each page and
index.xx.xhtml pages).


> Of course if Flux CMS would be changed to not use the .something 
> endings anymore it could cause broken URI:s for people upgrading. So 
> one would have to make it translate the old URI:s to the new ones or 
> something... maybe just to ignore anything after the last dot in the  URI.

It's not that easy, as explained above eg. with the categories.

The theory of the w3c is nice, but it really doesn't hold up one-to-one
to the real world, IMHO and I don't see much benefit for Flux CMS with
it (but one could still implement it, I'm not against it)

Too long post :)

chregu





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