Standard URLs
There’s been some discussion in the blogosphere about the idea of Standard URLS, which basically, is the idea that you create standardized hierarchies like http://www.mysite.tld/books/stephen_king/The%20Shining so that on any site, the ‘right’ part of the URL is standardized across many sites. It’s a fun idea, but my sample URL points out some of the many issues that would need to be resolved. Stephen_King, stephen_king, king,stephen are all valid URL text, as is The%20Shining, so there’s a huge issue right there.
Alex Iskold said
/topic/major-attribute/title/[one or more minor attributes]
Each object needs to be presented so that it is as distinct as possible. The disambiguation is done by adding one or more minor attributes after the title. For example, for a book a minor attribute could be a type - softcover or hardcover. It is important to agree on the sequence of the minor attributes for each topic. For example, for music it could be year, followed by record label followed by genre.
On the latter part of that paragraph I would have to disagree most vehemently. If anything like this has any prayer of succeeding, the order of tags has to be dynamic. In fact, the whole schema of the standard URL needs to be dynamic.
/book/author/title seems as it would be fine as a standardized url that has to be specified in that order, but once you get to any greater granularity than that, enforcing an order is doomed to fail. Language, large print, audio book, hard cover, 1st edition, braille, trade paperback, paperback, uk release, etc etc etc. There are limitless minor categories and the idea of having a standard order is just silly. For movie, though, how often do you know the director’s name? Including spelling? How useful is movie/Guillermo del Toro/Laberinto del fauno, El/ to anyone?
The fact is, our apache servers are smarter than that.
Let’s say we have a site, www.libros.tld that we want to standardize.
So, we create a heirarchy http://www.libros.tld/SU/
now, everything after the /SU/ level (for Standard URL) is simply a search term that is passed to the website’s internal search engine. I can type ANYTHING after that URL and it will be searched out.
This is, in fact, how the site www.macupdate.com works. if I type in www.macupdate.com/torrent I get back a search result list for all the Macintosh torrent clients. If I type in something more specific, I will be taken directly to the page on MacUpdate for that program.
A standard URL scheme like this would allow me to go to amazon and type in: www.amazon.com/SU/music/rufus/want one/ when I can’t remember how to spell Wainwright. And that SAME SU url would work on any other site as well.
Technology that is smart is always preferable to enforcing arbitrary standards.