Category Archives: Advocacy
URL Quote #4: An utter disaster to disable the URL
“Given that social filtering is one of the most powerful mechanisms for information discovery on the Internet, it is an utter disaster to disable the URL as an addressing mechanism. “ -Jakob Nielsen on “Why Frames Suck (Most of the … Continue reading
Seeing things the way in which one wants them to be (not the way they are)
Throughout history there have been people who only saw things as they wanted them to be. People with strongly held beliefs whose values guided their actions be they counter-productive, detrimental, or worse just plain wrong; nothing mattered but to believe … Continue reading
URL Quote #3: Wikipedia’s URLs a reason for their success?
“Wikipedia’s URL spaces are highly elegant; I suspect it’s one of the reason’s Wikipdedia is successful” -Bill de hOra on “Wikipedia’s Highly Elegant URLs“
URL Quote #2: Think about your website’s “public face.”
“…one should take an hour or so and really think about their website’s ‘public face.’” -Scott Hanselman on “A Website’s Public Face“
URL Quote #1: A URL is like a big “YOU ARE HERE” sign
“A URL is like a big “YOU ARE HERE” sign for each page of your site. It should allow people to get a sense of where they are in your site, even if they decide not to use that information … Continue reading
Sorry Mark; URL Design DOES matter!
I was planning to blog something else today, but Mark Nottingham of Yahoo made a statement about URL Design [1] in his post entitled REST Issues, Real and Imagined and I simply could not let his statement without comment. But first … Continue reading
PayPal’s New API: So Close, Yet So Far
I got an email from the PayPal Developer Network today announcing PayPal’s new “NVP” (or “Name-Value Pair“) API. Clearly they’ve learned that the complexity of SOAP is counter productive to adoption. Here’s what the email had to say about their … Continue reading
Use rel=”spam” to Fight Comment Spam?
As I was going through my Akismet spam filter today reviewing the 87 comment spam I got during the prior ~24 hours to ensure I didn’t delete any legitimate comments, it occurred to me that maybe there is a simple … Continue reading
Bitten by the URI Opacity Axiom
Jon Udel has a post today entitled Divergent citation-indexing paths. Funny that he wrote about this; it seems he and I are on such a parallel trajectory these days. For evidence, take a look at my post from last … Continue reading
Best Practice: Always ID your Heading Tags
Here’s a simple best practice. Always ID your heading tags! For example, if you’ve got an <h2> element, be sure to make it <h2 id=”some-heading”>. IDing heading tags is especially important on long documents. Why? Because if you don’t, someone … Continue reading
Help Expose the URLs that Suck!
Something that would be fun would be to see a list of the top 10 worst designed URLs on the web, a.k.a. URLs that Suck! You know the type, you cringe when you see ‘em, especially if you frequently use … Continue reading
Lessons Learned from Delicious Praise
I learned an interesting lesson about URLs and social software; change your article’s URL or publish it under multiple cases, even with 301 redirects, and you’ll end up with fragmented references. Back in August 2005 I published the article “Well … Continue reading
Proposing URI Templates for WebForms 2.0
I recently had an off-list email conversation with Ian Hickson, the editor of the Web Application Hypertext Technology Working Group specifications (i.e. HTML5 and WebForms 2.0). I was proposing to him that the current WebForms 2.0 be draft specification be … Continue reading
Intro, Part 15: About URLQuiz
As a way to gather a broad spectrum of opinion and engage the community on many different URL-related topics, we’ll be offering a URLQuiz from time to time. Inspired by and patterned after Dan Cederholm‘s very well received SimpleQuiz series, … Continue reading
Intro, Part 14: About our URL Structure
For our web applications — our website, wiki, blog, and future forums — we chose to segment each by sub-domain; “wiki.”, “blog.”, and “forums.”, respectively. Rather than having subdirectories underneath the root of our www domain such as “/wiki/”, … Continue reading
Intro, Part 13: The Web Apps We Use
Here’s a run down of the web application software we are using or planning to use for the Well Designed URLs Initiative: Blog At “blog.” is running WordPress using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. We have direct experience with WordPress, … Continue reading
Intro, Part 12: Major Topics from Different Angles
One of our plans is look at major topics from many different angles. Though this will allow us to revisit an issue numerous times, our main reason for covering topics in this manner is that making sure our coverage is … Continue reading
About URI Templates
Probably one of the most interesting projects related to URL Design on which anyone is currently working is the URI Templates project spearheaded by Joe Gregorio of IBM. While not sexy and not something most end users will ever see, infrastructure … Continue reading
Intro, Part 1a: The Unsung URL
NOTE: To see why this is labeled “Part 1a” see [1]. Although many people view the URL to be a rather obscure little creature, the URL is the arguably the most important of the web’s three essential legs; the “First … Continue reading
Proposing HTTP Request Forwarding
I’ve been monitoring the ietf-http-wg mailing list and have noticed there is renewed actively around revising RFC 2616, the HTTP/1.1 specification. This renewed activity got me thinking it was time to discuss the need for HTTP Request Forwarding. I’ll start … Continue reading →