I had never really given much thought to URL shortening services, like TinyURL. But I had to be sitting under a rock to miss the recent outage, that caused the blogosphere to flutter vigorously. But I wonder if this was only because of one single big client it has - the Twitter. [Continue]
I have been steadily gaining knowledge and confidence with REST and the philosophy behind it. With resource as the protagonist, URL design is an important activity. Typically, well designed URLs convey more than location of a resource. [Continue]
Bill Venners comments on David Heinemeier Hansson’s justification for using integers in URLs instead of semantic strings in Ruby On Rails. As an example, if you look at the URL of the Help of this blog, it is http://ifacethoughts.net/help. As against this, using integers would give you http://ifacethoughts.net/564 where 564 is the database ID of the page for help. [Continue]
Tim Bray wants to introduce indirection for links. It may sound complicated and unnecessary, but in fact it can something quite relevant. He brings up the point of depending on a single web site for referencing, like Wikipedia, creating a single point of failure. [Continue]
Anthony Cowley explains his fear of URIs. URIs aka URLs are ways of addressing resources on the Web. And URIs are used to use other resources on the Net, which creates a dependency not only on the resource but also on the technology involved. [Continue]
Frank Sommers discusses about supporting content negotiation or alternate URLs. Source of this discussion is a series of articles on a meaningful web for humans and machines (Part 1 and Part 2) by Lee Feigenbaum and Elias Torres. The articles explore techniques for a parallel web, one for the humans and the other for the machines. [Continue]