[Seaside] Meaningful URLs was (Re: HV intro...) on the Squeak list

Cees de Groot cg@cdegroot.com
16 Apr 2002 19:44:49 +0200


Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin@texoma.net> said:
>One thing I always liked about Zope is the that URLs are understandable
>and bookmarkable. I like that as a website user. I patently despise
>ugly, unreadable URLs.
>
I've got some very ugly URLs between my bookmarks. I couldn't care less,
because the software shows the title of the page, not the URL itself. 

Any webserver needs to match context at the server side with context at the
user side. There are exactly three solutions to do this:
- Put it in the URL;
- Put it in a cookie;
- Submit it with every request through hidden form variables.
The latter one is neat, but it means that you cannot have normal <A>-style
links anymore; so in practice, you either uglify URL's or make it necessary
for the user to enable cookies. 

Ugly URL's may be ugly, but at least there are no political discussions around
ugly URL's or users that have disabled ugly URL's. When relying on cookies,
lots of users will barf.

Actually, I think it's completely unnecessary that a URL is human readable. To
the extent that you need to type them in by hand, that is only necessary for
URL's that sit behind bad navigation (for example, you always forget how to
get from the frontpage of CompanyA.com to its ProductX page - you need to
bookmark or remember the URL); that's bad web design. In all other cases, ugly
URL's are OK - you can mail them, bookmark them, etcetera. Most important is
they don't get too long, and as such a URL that has http://web.site.com/<some
128bit random number encoded base32> might be much more suitable for mailing
and bookmarking than
http://web.site.com/some/very/verbose/path/into/an/obscure/sublocation/of/the/website,
not?

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>
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