url | iface thoughts

Apr 13, 2009

Pondering Over URL Shortening

The Web has been busy trying to find a way out of URL shortner services. Kellan Elliott-McCrea has worked out a solution which lets the publisher gain control over the shortening. I think using rev to indicate the shortened version might get confusing, but it is also true that it seems to offer the best balance in the current situation. [Continue]

Feb 14, 2009

Canonical URLs To Avoid Duplicate Content

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! together have come up with canonical URLs to solve the problem of duplicate content on a site. We can convey our preferred URL for a page by including a link element in the head of the (X)HTML page. [Continue]

Nov 22, 2007

Are URL Shortening Services Really Required In HTML World?

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]

Aug 20, 2007

Questions On URL Design

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]

Jan 24, 2007

Strings Or Numbers?

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]

Jan 23, 2007

Linking 2.0

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]

Jan 20, 2007

Problem With URIs

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]

Jan 20, 2007

URLs, Content Negotiation And Parallel Web

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]