Intro, Part 8: Expect to see Recommendations
One of our main goals is to publish an evolving list of URL Design and related recommendations that the world of web architects, website administrators and web developers will respect and embrace. Our recommendations will include advocacy for, but not limited to the following:
- Establishing Sitemaps as fundamental in URL Design,
- Recognizing URL Patterns as first class concepts,
- Conventions for file-extension to media-type mapping,
- Deprecating Regular Expressions for URL Rewriting,
- Use of URI Templates where applicable,
- Hardening URI Templates for real world usages,
- URL-related Metadata in HTML and HTTP,
- Formalizing the use of Canonical URLs as identifiers,
- Exposing Canonical URLs to users,
- Leveraging the Permalink to identify Canonical URLs and more,
- Handling URLs with Embedded Session Identifiers,
- Handling URLs with Embedded User Identifiers,
- Handling URLs with Embedded Print Modes,
- URL Virtualization to overcome platform limitations,
- Well-known Media-Types for REST’s Hypermedia Constraint,
- Making URIs Dereferencable whenever possible,
- Strategies for dereferencing every URI to a resource,
- Creating Unique URLs for all Dereferenceable Resources,
- Rationalizing Content Negotiation vs. Unique URLs,
- A Web Request Media-type for POST, PUT, and DELETE,
- Strategies for serving Alternate Language Representations,
- Making AJAX, Flash, and PDF resources dereferenceable,
- Publishing Multiple URL Paths to the same resource,
- Metadata to allow greater URL equivalence evaluation,
- Recommending software based on URL configurability,
- Recommending to vendors how to improve URL configurability,
- Exposing Segmentable Content via URL Fragments,
- Exposing URLs for all deferencable content,
- Strategies for handling Broken Links,
- Strategies for URL-related Education for all users,
- And even more.
So you see, we’re planning to bite off an awful lot here but we think by doing so we’ll benefit all web users. Didn’t realize that URLs had so much to room for improvement? Stay tuned…