[Sigia-l] URL design - mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes

[PeterV]

> > This is a pretty big pet peeve of mine as a user and as someone who
> > needs to give people reference URLs quite often. The increasing use of
> > database-driven sites (sometimes in cases where static would easily
> > suffice) and the accompanying use of *ungodly* long and unwieldy URLs
> > (I think really good programmers can minimize this but I've yet to see
> > it) drives me insane ...

URL design is another thing that people tend to be just too lazy/not have 
enough billable hours for to do properly. It's not too hard though:
http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/Design/Usability/use6_1.html

For me, the main rules are:
- as short a possible, but usable
- no unnecessary information (from the users point of view) should be in 
the URL (so no silly long database id's, that's just dumb)
- somewhat human readable
- hackable (ie. you can go up a level and it makes sense)
- slashes, no query strings
- scalable: url's should live forever

One example I've been trying to figure out is multiple language versions of 
an article. Some options: (1 is the number of the article)
http://www.domain.com/en/1
http://en.domain.com/1
http://en.subdomain.domain.com/1
http://www.domain.com/1.en.html
http://www.domain.com/en/article_1_title/
http://en.domain.com/webdesign/2002/url_design_issues/version3/
It gets more complicated when you add previous versions of the article with 
the translations, or dates, or other relevant info (author, ...).

PeterV
http://petervandijck.net