My XTech 2007 Conference Proposal

Posted on December 15, 2006 by Mike Schinkel

Since I spent the entire past day and well into the night working on my proposal for speaking at the XTech 2007: ‘The Ubiquitous Web’ conference, I wasn’t able to complete my promised Friday installment of the introduction. Rather than go dark on you, I decided to publish my proposal here for all to see. Let’s hope they select it!

The Ubiquitous URI: URL Design and Why it Matters

by Mike Schinkel

When Tim Berners-Lee created the web, he developed three fundamental technologies: HTML, HTTP, and the URI. To date, most people have viewed the URI as just plumbing, not to be seen by mere mortals. In this talk I aim to present the history of why, the tremendous benefits to be had from a changed view, and how attendees’ skills combined with their future actions can create incredible new value.

This talk will be given presentation style reminiscent of Lawrence Lessig; lots of slides covered quickly for 30 minutes, and then 10 minutes for questions . It intends to create awareness, not complete comprehension of all aspects covered. Resources for future research and understanding will be given as well as a call to action for participation at the end.

Attendee Benefits

The value of this session to attendees will be:

  • Appreciation of all that URLs involve and affect
  • Understand the history and technology of URIs, URLs, and URNs
  • Appreciate the real world relevance of URL design
  • Knowledge of Patterns and Best Practices
  • Learn newer and rarely known use-cases for URLs
  • A peek into the future of the URL
  • Participate in the future of URL technology, if desired

Outline of Presentation

  1. Intro – 3 minutes
    • URL Design: Why Should you Care?
    • URIs: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
    • The URI vs. the URL vs. the URN
    • URLs are Everywhere: Make them Usable
  2. Past – 5 minutes
    • The Three Pillars of the Web: HTML, HTTP, and URI
    • It’s all Politics (and a little bit of technology)
    • The Sorry State of Affairs: Who can we blame? :-)
  3. Present – 9 minutes
    • URL Design: Who is your Constituent?
    • Technical Concerns are Secondary: URL Design’s Many Considerations
    • Attributes of a Well Designed URL
    • Resolution Matters: Why a “200 OK” is Essential
    • The URI Opacity Axiom: Separating Dogma from Fact
    • Achieving RESTfulness: URL Design’s Significance to REST
    • Mashups made Easier: RESTful URL Design
    • The Semantic Web: Dead without URL Design
    • Content Management Systems Considered Harmful: Well, not all the them
    • Untold Damaged Caused by Flash and AJAX: Resolving their Trespasses
    • Running afoul of the Law: Legal Issues with URLs
    • Principle of Minimum Constraints: Is this Contradictory?
    • Down and Dirty: Patterns and Practices
    • Case Study
  4. Future – 10 minutes
    • A subset of Web Science
    • Web 2.0 Success requires URL Design: Why?
    • Regular Expressions Too Hard: URI Templates
    • Everything important needs a URI: Defining What’s Important
    • But Mother will never understand: Stop Treating Users Like Children
    • Permalinks: The Hidden Champion
    • Fragments are your Friend: Expose them!
    • URLs and Metadata: Leveraging HTML and HTTP
    • Extending the URL: Web Requests
    • “But My App Server Can’t Do that!”: Breaking free of Platform Constraints
    • Envisioning a future where all URLs resolve: Solving Link Rot
    • The Future GUID: URL as Primary Key
  5. Summary – 3 minutes
    • Review of Key Points
    • Resources and additional references provided
    • Call to Action: The World is your Oyster, Help Make a Pearl
  6. Q&A – 10 minutes
    • Open the floor for questions

Session Outcome

At the end of session attendees should be able to:

  • Understand the basic aspects of URL design
  • Apply basic patterns and best practices
  • Seek community help for more complex URL design
  • Leverage URLs in ways they probably never considered
  • Join with others to extend URL technology

Prerequisites

Basic understanding of

  • HTTP protocol
  • HTML authoring
  • DNS and domains
  • Current events related to the web

P.S. I submitted three other proposals, but you’ll have to wait to see if they accept any of them before I can tell you about them. :)

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Intro, Part 4: More than just Mapping

Posted on December 14, 2006 by Mike Schinkel

Many people see URLs and think only of technical concerns. You can see this thinking in websites implemented using Vignette and in most websites implemented using Microsoft’s ASP.NET. This we feel this shortsightedness is a serious error in judgment.

Alternately, we believe that the study of URL Design should be an important component of Web Science. And, like Web Science, we believe URL Design must consider many factors to truly optimize Uniform Resource Locator use for both man and machine. Those factors that URL designers really should consider minimally include the following:

Clearly URL Design is not just about mapping files and scripts on a server.

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Intro, Part 3: Focus on User-Centered URL Design

Posted on December 13, 2006 by Mike Schinkel

First and foremost, the focus of the Well Designed URL Initiative is User-Centered URL Design. Although URLs a.k.a. URIs are used in many places that typical users never see, our primary focus will be to advocate for the designing of those URLs that users do see.

And by “users” I don’t just mean people who are surfing the web using a browser but also people who interact with URLs on many other levels. Those other users include the web developers who build and maintain websites as well as the system administrators who install and maintain the web servers. These users need URL usability just as much as average users, if not more.

What we don’t plan to address, necessarily, are those URLs that humans never see. Yes there are a lot of systems that generate URLs and pass them around from computer to computer but those are not our focus here. The vast majority of URLS are seen by humans[1] and as such are assertion is that those URLs should be understandable by humans too.

At least that’s our contention.

  1. Even when URLs are machine-generated and used only by machines to communicate with other machines humans still need to debug those systems, so I could argue that well designed URLs make sense even there. But I won’t split hairs today.
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Intro, Part 2: The Long Tentacles of URL Design

Posted on December 12, 2006 by Mike Schinkel

At first glance, you might think that the Disciple of URL Design is a relatively narrow subject. Au Contraire my good reader, the subject of URL Design is miles deep and oceans wide. URL Design permeates practically everything about software and the web today. Almost every web standard that’s been recommended or even discussed as well as almost every recently-released software package leverages the lowly URL.

So be aware that URL Design extends mightily into almost all aspects of web and software design, and as such studying URL Design, understanding what constitutes a good URL design, and defining URL Design Best Practices can bring great benefits for all.

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Intro, Part 1: Hello and Welcome

Posted on December 11, 2006 by Mike Schinkel

Hello and welcome to the first of a series of introduction posts for the Well Designed URLs Initiative blog. During the next month I plan to present why I launched the Well Designed URLs Initiative, provide background on URLs and their history, and present my strategy and goals for the initiative. I’ll be posting each day Monday through Friday until I’ve posted the entire introduction. I’ll also include a list of links to all the introduction posts here.

After that, I’ll get on with the real business of the initiative and this blog; advocating for User-Centered URL Design.

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Coming Soon…

Posted on November 6, 2006 by Mike Schinkel

If you are checking out this blog and dismayed that we’ve got no content online yet, please note we’ll currently doing a ton of research on good Url design so we won’t post uninformed opinons and then look like ignoramouses!

But please be sure to subscribe your RSS reader because we’ll soon be publishing a plethora of information about good Url design.

Posted in Everyone, Introduction | 3 Comments