Re: wgo url policy

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

Dave Neary wrote:
> [...]
> > - I suggest no extensions to file names, this way resources can act as
> > containers
> > for example:
> > www.gnome.org/start and www.gnome.org/start/2.14
> > instead of
> > www.gnome.org/start.html and www.gnome.org/start/2.14 
> >     
>
> I don't think this is really an issue. Direct linking to a html page is
> common, having one directory per page (which is what would result) is
> unwieldy, and (as you point out) .odf, .pdf, .jpg, etc - files have
> extensions, those extensions convey some information. I don't think we
> need a policy for this.
>   
***Jakob Nielsen <http://www.useit.com/jakob/> wrote an interesting 
article on this subject* <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html>. 
There is also an informative article here 
<http://www.isoc.org/HMP/PAPER/016/html/paper.html>. Intriguingly 
however, both these urls contradict their articles advice!

I would be in favour of keeping urls as simple as possible, and removing 
unnecessary information on page urls, such as .html or .php. N.B. I'm 
not advocating taking off the the extensions for .jpg files - I can't 
think of a use case where we would ever want to point a visitor at a 
.jpg file. We have utilities like modrewrite, so we don't need to create 
a directory for each page. art.gnome.org actually has two files called 
/backgrounds and /themes that deal with all the requests from urls such 
as /themes/icon/1234 (and I've even considered adding the ability for 
/themes/icon/gartoon).

-Thomas