[Sigia-l] Turning URLs into directories

[James Aylett]

Donna wrote:

> > What architectural issues do you foresee for this?
>
> Defining the damn thing

I agree; I don't see how it would be remotely possible to come up with a single schema (even within a narrow space such as books) that would match what *everyone* wanted to do with it. Getting people to agree that it should be /book/AUTHOR/BOOK would cause problems with how you deal with non-ASCII characters (which could be put in using IRIs, or might be Anglicized); with people who want 'book' localized because their site is only targetted at one group; with sites who would like /boot/CATEGORY/AUTHOR/BOOK (and then you get into trying to define the categories... urgh).

What people can do, however, is to encourage the use of "hackable URLs". See:

 * http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html
 * http://simonwillison.net/2003/Jul/30/newsSiteURLs/
 * http://welldesignedurls.org/

Again, not always appropriate, but helpful in many cases. Note, for instance, that Simon Willison's URLs (the second link) are more hackable than Nielsen's, because you can lop off bits from the end and get increasingly-scoped archive pages.

James