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Re: Best Practice for URI construction?

• To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>
• Subject: Re: Best Practice for URI construction?
• From: Ian Graham <ian.graham@u...>
• Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:41:19 -0500
• Cc: 'Chris Burdess' <dog@b...>, "'Costello, Roger L.'" <costello@m...>,'XML Developers List' <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <200512101629.jBAGT4aD026907@b...>
• References: <200512101629.jBAGT4aD026907@b...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803

Perhaps a better approach is to ask how people or software expect - or 
should expect - URLs to behave (when dereferenced) when they are 
modified in some way.

I recall some PhD research on this (someone from University of Victoria, 
I believe, about 8 years ago, but I can't recall the author's name).

One observation/result was that a substantial fraction of users expect 
truncating a URL at 'natural' places to return meaningful results. This, 
for example, is one of the intuitive 'search' algorithms people use when 
a link doesn't work. As an example, if

http://somewhere.org/US/IL/

is a valid URL, then truncating this to

http://somewhere.org/US/

should both work and provide meaningful information.

Similarly a person would expect:

http://somewhere.org/US/?st=IL

To degrade naturally when truncated to

http://somewhere.org/US/

However, if you have complicated name/value pairs in the URL query string:

http://somewhere.org/?st=IL&co=US

Then (if I remember correctly) there is no natural truncation, since 
there is no natural hierarchy in the order of query string data. Users 
tend to just chop off the entire query string, and try what's left.

The research had a lot of other interesting observations ... just can't 
recall what they were.... and can't find the paper or remember then name 
of the woman who did the work ...

Ian

Michael Kay wrote:

>>Doesn't that beg the question of whether these things are resources at
>>all, given that resources appear to be defined as "objects on the
>>Internet" by Tim B-L in RFC 1630?
> 
> 
> If we confined ourselves to objects on the internet, life would be much
> easier. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be keen on using URIs to
> identify objects in the real world.
> 
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Ian Graham
H: 416.769.2422 / W: 416.513.5656 / E: <ian . graham AT utoronto . ca>

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