URI Opacity Revisited
The question regarding “meaningful” or “human friendly” URIs comes up a lot if you’re trying to design a Website or Web-accessible information architecture (including a Web service). This subject came up again recently on the SOA mailing list (I didn’t see the beginning of the thread, but this is where I started paying attention).
There are some key points about URIs and opacity that anyone who’s really going to the trouble to design them should keep in mind (originally presented by Dan Connolly at a W3C event back in 2001):
DO
- …make URIs mnemonic when it’s convenient
DON’T
- …depend on finding metadata in URIs
- …depend on search engine heuristics regarding query parameters
- …depend on file extensions
- …depend on URIs for user interface
Basically, don’t peek inside the URI. Read the rest of this entry »
