Category Archives: Audience
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 #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
URLQuiz #2: URL Equivalence and Cachability
This is quiz #2 of our ongoing URLQuiz series. In this quiz, there are 26 pairs of URLs (A..Z) and for each pair the questions is: “Which of these two URLs are equivlent?” i.e. which return the same resource when … 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
An Embarrassment of Riches!
Wow. Over the past several days there have been numerous articles about URL design in one format or another, so much so that I’ve not been able to comment on them all in a reasonable amount of time. Rather than … Continue reading
ASPnix Supports URL Rewriting
After a long thread over at the forums for the web host ASPnix who specializes in Community Server where customers were clamoring for URL rewriting capability, ASPnix finally announced that it will now offer ISAPI Rewrite to its customers on ASPnix’s … Continue reading
PageRank
SEO: Illuminating the value of URL design If you’ve read many of our other posts here at The Well Designed URLs Initiative, you know that we are strong advocates for User-Centered URL Design as well as for URL Literacy. It’s … Continue reading
URLQuiz #1: To .WWW or not to .WWW?
As promised, this is the first of what will be many URLQuizes here are the blog for The Well Designed URLs Initiative. This URLQuiz discusses the convention of using a subdomain with the name ‘www‘ to identify a website. As … 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
URLs for Multilingual Web Sites
Another URLian has appeared: Brad Fults. Brad just added himself to our wiki and became a signatory; thanks Brad! Better yet, on his user page on our wiki he linked to his post Designing URLs for Multilingual Web Sites; execellent … Continue reading
Which is Worst: the URL for IE7 Add-ons, Firefox Extensions, or Greasemonkey?
I am working on a project that had me was writing about browser plug-ins and I needed to link to the main page for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Add-ons, for Firefox’s Extensions, and lastly for Greasemonkey for Firefox. I actually looked up … 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
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 →