Intro, Part 7: Conventions, not Constraining Requirements
There is a belief among the people who guide the web’s technical architecture, people I like to call the “Weborati“, that as few constraints as possible should be placed on web publishers and web users. This is referred to as the Principle of Minimal Constraint. An example of such a constraint is the Robots Exclusion Standard that uses the “robots.txt” filename to inform search engines of pages to avoid. Because of this robots.txt “standard”, a web publisher can’t use a file named robots.txt in the root of their website for any other purpose besides the Robots Exclusion Standard without disabling their ability to inform web robots which files to ignore.
Although using the Well-known Name “robots.txt” was justified by Roy T. Fielding, use of well-known names such as those required by P3P and Favicon continue to be a sore point among the Weborati. However, contrary to some initial concerns, we here at the Well Designed URLs Initiative agree that using well-known names is A Bad Thing(tm) in Web Architecture. So let me state for the record: It is not our intention to encourage any new well-known names.
On the other hand, we do intend to recommend convention. Good conventions can increase productivity immensely by eliminating the need to evaluate alternate yet arbitrary choices. One such convention is the multi-column web page layout complete with a menu along either the top or one of the side columns. Prior to that established layout, right for many websites but not all, web designers spent considerable time evaluating different layouts. I, for one, am glad to have gotten past that stage.
Good conventions can aid common understanding if those conventions are widely used. For example the Internet sub-domain naming convention of “www” has helped many non-technical people recognize a web address on a business card, a TV advertisement, and on the side of a bus.
And good conventions can spawn an entire industry segment, unleashing a completely new layer of value. When Jesse James Garrett published his now well-known essay entitled “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications,” he recognized a design pattern that many people had been using in obscurity, and that recognition catalyzed a mega-million dollar segment of the web development industry.
Though we could only hope our efforts have the same effect, we do hope to influence how people perceive and use the lowly URL. For example via research and a consensus of opinion, it would be greeat to establish a widely used convention for how multi-lingual websites design their URLs.
Although conventions can be constraining, conventions are not in and of themselves requirements. Just as it is well known that “www” probably means “website”, it is not a requirements and the fact many websites use alternate sub-domain names prove it. For example, “newyork,” “london,” and “paris” could all easily be used as sub-domain names for relevant websites. Or a website can easily use no sub-domain at all!
So it is our hope we can get people from the Weborati down to the non-technical website owners to appreciate and embrace numerous new URL conventions in the future.