Gulfstream

Entry Posted February 4, 2007

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/4/urls/ URL design, and why the same piece of content should never be reachable by more than one URL. (See also Jacob Neilsen’s 1999 piece on the URL as UI.)

(Listing the raw URL in blog posts has been my small contribution to the URL awareness effort.) 19:00

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http://blog.wordaligned.org (blog.wordaligned.org):
… No www Inspired by thisarticle, I’ve chopped the www from this site’s address. Wordaligned.org is four characters fewer to type and a whole seven syllables (!) fewer to say than www.wordaligned.org. From now on anyone visiting …

Noisy Decent Graphics (noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com):
… The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI" and "Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs". Very funny. I never understand why more people don't talk about disambiguated URLs. They make so much sense. Don't know what I'm on about? ReadGood URLs are important. The best URLs are readable, reliable and hackableand find out. I hope you've read this by now but if you haven't then you MUST read the BBC's Fifteen Principles. It will improve your web design. On a lighter note you could watch Steve Job's All Time Favourite words …

Derivadow.com (derivadow.com):
… your resource deals with more than one concept, it should only be found at one (persistent) URL so that search engines can index it properly (so people can find it); so people can link to it and; so third party applications can be integrated with it.Simon Willisonexplains why, although people may well be able to discern that two URLs probably point to the same thing, machines can’t. Once you have a single resource at a single persistent URL you can start to do some interesting things. You can make that …

MarteyDodoo.com (www.marteydodoo.com):
… Further Reading Simon Willison explainswhy having your information accessible through only one URL is important. Apache's mod_rewrite documentation. Without mod_rewrite, the redirects in my .htaccess would not work. …

Harvard Blogs Aggregator (ben-white.org):
… parameter, which stops any further redirecting from occurring. The previous redirect, in its new form: RewriteRule ^video/16militarywives.mp4 http://www.archive.org/details/TheDecemberists16MilitaryWives [L] Further Reading Simon Willison explainswhy having your information accessible through only one URL is important. Apache's mod_rewrite documentation. Without mod_rewrite, the redirects in my .htaccess would not work. …

Noisy Decent Graphics (noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com):
… The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI" and "Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs". Very funny. I never understand why more people don't talk about disambiguated URLs. They make so much sense. Don't know what I'm on about? ReadGood URLs are important. The best URLs are readable, reliable and hackableand find out. I hope you've read this by now but if you haven't then you MUST read the BBC's Fifteen Principles. It will improve your web design. On a lighter note you could watch Steve Job's All Time Favourite words …

Derivadow.com (derivadow.wordpress.com):
… your resource deals with more than one concept, it should only be found at one (persistent) URL so that search engines can index it properly (so people can find it); so people can link to it and; so third party applications can be integrated with it.Simon Willisonexplains why, although people may well be able to discern that two URLs probably point to the same thing, machines can’t. Once you have a single resource at a single persistent URL you can start to do some interesting things. You can make that …

Derivadow.com (derivadow.com):
… your resource deals with more than one concept, it should only be found at one (persistent) URL so that search engines can index it properly (so people can find it); so people can link to it and; so third party applications can be integrated with it.Simon Willisonexplains why, although people may well be able to discern that two URLs probably point to the same thing, machines can’t. Once you have a single resource at a single persistent URL you can start to do some interesting things. You can make that …

James Gardner (jimmyg.org):
… previous parts of the URL should describe that thing too. In this case james is a person, not a people so /person/james is more appropriate. You can use this convention throughout your application in naming controllers, database tables etc. Only useDisambiguated URLs …

JW (jw.zidev.com):
… Del.icio.us Links More -Why you should be using disambiguated URLsGood URLs should be unambiguous. Any piece of content that has different URLs, should have one definitive URL, alternatives acting as a permanent redirect to it. Heuristic Testing A presentation on (unit) testing. …

Painfully Obvious (andrewdupont.net):
… Why you should be using disambiguated URLs. Between this and all the OpenID stuff, Simon has been on fire these last few months. …

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