Category Archives: Technologies

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

Posted in Champions, Frames, URL Quotes, Virality | Leave a comment

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

Posted in Call to Action, For Comment, HTTP, Potential, Standards Participants | 3 Comments

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“

Posted in Champions, URIs, URL Quotes | Leave a comment

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“

Posted in All Organizations, Best Practices, Champions, Everyone, Framework Developers, Hosting Providers, Open-Source Participants, SEO Consultants, Standards Participants, Teachers, URIs, URL Quotes, URL Rewriters, Web App Providers, Web Designers, Web Developers | Leave a comment

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

Posted in Everyone, URIs, URLQuiz | 12 Comments

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

Posted in All Organizations, Internet Professionals, REST, SoapBox, Teachers, URIs | 3 Comments

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

Posted in All Organizations, Basic, Framework Developers, Hosting Providers, Infrastructure Providers, Open-Source Participants, Overview, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Consultants, Teachers, URIs, Web App Providers, Web Developers | 8 Comments

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

Posted in Commentary, Framework Developers, Leading Companies, REST, SOAP, SoapBox, Web Developers, Website Owners | 2 Comments

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

Posted in Axioms, Commentary, Internet Professionals, SoapBox, URIs | 2 Comments

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

Posted in Call to Action, Framework Developers, Open-Source Participants, Potential, SoapBox, Software Vendors, Standards Participants, URI Templates, Web App Providers, Web Developers, Web Forms | 8 Comments

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

Posted in Internet Professionals, Proposals, REST, Sitemaps, SoapBox, Software Vendors, URI Templates, URL Rewriters, URL Virtualization | 1 Comment