Re: wgo url policy

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Gergely Nagy wrote:
> Minimal redundancy
> Avoid multiple URLs for a given page. Currently both http://gnome.org
> and http://www.gnome.org exist. I suggest to forward all gnome.org
> access to www.gnome.org. Are there any duplicate pages on wgo now?

These are not duplicate pages, they are aliases. gnome.org is an alias
for www.gnome.org.

> - 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.

> - let's keep URLs lowercase?
> does such a policy make sense? it's purely cosmetic, but can suggest
> consistency across gnome websites, if applied throughout
> - could be problem with WikiNames - perhaps they will be exceptions?

The wiki is outside the scope of things - lower-case URLs sounds
reasonable to me.

> No collisions
> A URL should always point to the same resource. Once we define a URL, we
> should not change it's meaning. Say, we create a page, remove it after
> it expires, and then later create another one with the same URL - BAD.

You gave a counter-example yourself with news - parts of our site will
be variable and will change regularly, there should be a fixed point of
contact for those. We should use page expiration redirects to retire
pages taken out of service though, you're right.

> I could not yet decide what I think is the best URL scheme for I18N.

I think the best is no URL scheme for languages and use the browser
preferences.

Of the propositions, I like this best:
> www.gnome.org/LANG/x/y/z


> www.gnome.org/x/y/z?lang=LANG

This one implies no static content, and handling HTTP GETs for every
page (probably to be avoided).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
David Neary
bolsh gimp org