[Seaside] Truly Opaque URLs

[Adrian Lienhard]

I think in this discussion we should distinguish between closed  
applications and public web sites (or applications that are part of a  
web site). In the former case I don't care at all about the URLs, and  
only care about bookmarking in very specific situations because it  
usually does not make sense.

On the other hand, on a public web site it matters. It matters for  
example for search engines. If each link looks differently although it  
points to the same page, this is not good. Also, you don't want that  
the session key of the bot shows up in search results. You want to  
make important keywords be part of the URL, you want URLs to be short  
so that people can easily mail them around (and no, I don't buy the  
argument that also Amazon has unfriendly URLs).

Out of the box Seaside is not very good at such things, but then,  
Seaside is for building web applications, not web sites.
However, in case you happen to use Seaside for web sites (as we do for www.cmsbox.com 
  for example) it is not too hard to tweak it.

Cheers,
Adrian

On Dec 17, 2007, at 22:14 , Jimmie Houchin wrote:

> Jason Johnson wrote:
>> Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> Well, I suspect you are like me:  what my old boss called a  
>> "tweaker",
>> i.e. someone who is always tweaking something trying to make every
>> aspect perfect.  This is something one has to learn to control  
>> because
>> the fact is, when you're in tweaking mode you are almost certainly
>> working on something no one else in the world notices or cares about.
>>
>> In my case, I looked at how to get rid of those ugly strings, but I  
>> know
>> it doesn't matter so I limited my time to 5 minutes. I can click the
>> "use cookies" button and it works fine, if not ok.  What is  
>> important to
>> me is having bookmarkable URLs, but Seaside provides an effective  
>> way to
>> do that.
>>
>> I've never heard of one single person going "ew!  Look at those  
>> URL's,
>> I'm never looking at this site again!".  And I don't mean that to
>> belittle your comments in any way, just try to help put them in
>> perspective. :)
>
> Tweaker, well, hmmm....., yes! :)
>
> But I also like things to be beautiful when able. I was just wanting  
> to
> find out if such would be a readily available, low lying fruit, easy
> win. Apparently not.
>
> Bookmarkable URLs are important to me. And as you say, Seaside does
> provide a way to do such.
>
> Despite my preference for nice looking URLs. I have not gone running  
> to
> some other framework to do web development. I have yet to see anything
> as beautiful to work with or as productive.
>
> Seaside is far, far, far from being the worst offender in ugly URLs.  
> It
> probable wouldn't make the top 100. :)
>
> There are few frameworks which do them better, and many which do them
> much worse.
>
> So since there wasn't an easy win. I am going about learning and
> hopefully mastering Seaside. This isn't a large community but I do
> believe it to be a very good one. Response time is often very rapid.  
> We
> just need a few more experts scattered around the globe so that  
> there is
> most often an available expert. Even so, it is still pretty well  
> covered.
>
> Currently Seaside is as good as I've found.
>
> I have a hard time getting excited about anything not Smalltalk.  
> Love my
> Squeak. Spend enough time in Seaside and Smalltalk, it is very  
> possible
> to understand a much higher amount of the framework, toolkit, etc.  
> than
> in anything else I've found. Why more people can't see it, I don't  
> know.
> Its baffling. :)
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jimmie
> _______________________________________________
> seaside mailing list
> seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside