mercredi 15 septembre 2004

"Cool URIs don't change" An oldie-but-goodie from TimBL on a subject that has a lot of impact on CMSs, but particularly Zope. Back in the day, at Digital Creations, I used to give a spiel about Zope's URLs, saying in speeches "URLs you can read over the phone to Mom". Lots of knowing snickers from the audience that had learned to hate server-generated URLs and such. With Zope's "database that feels like a filesystem", we trick people into organization schemes that mirror what they do in Explorer on their drives. That was the whole point of the ZMI, to make the web feel normal. Unfortunately, people don't think of their disk as a permanent ID space. And they don't think of their Zope sites that way either, which means lots of googlebarfs. As this article says, hierarchies aren't a great way to encode URLs, because things are more fluid and web-like over their lifespan. The lesson is that a system should promote dumb identifiers and good mappings from URIs -> physical paths. "After the creation date, putting any information in the name is asking for trouble one way or another." Over the years we've had a number of projects in Zopeland touch on a few aspects of this problem. None though have reached the tipping point (IMO). It would be fun to see if a CMF-NG for Zope 3 could establish some patterns for this using the cool componentry of Zope 3. 3:41:54 PM   comment []