On the value of unambiguous URLs. Every URL must have one and only one URL — no optional “www,” no optional “index.whatever,” no optional trailing slash. Good advice. (Via Daring Fireball)
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Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
On the value of unambiguous URLs. Every URL must have one and only one URL — no optional “www,” no optional “index.whatever,” no optional trailing slash. Good advice. (Via Daring Fireball)
Comments are closed.
I have an ounce of sympathy for delicious and the like who wish to aggregate URLs, but this all comes about for a good reason. If I, as a site operator, know that 3% of people will enter http://www.foo.bar.com when I direct them to foo.bar.com, I damn well intend to make both urls work.
To do otherwise is to behave as if you had a front door on your business that 3% of people (handicapped, maybe?) couldn’t open. While there are limits and I don’t advocate coding to Netscape 2.0, for example, there are good reasons why multiple URLs resolve to the same identity.
Oh, I think there’s enormous value to providing such redirections, and I’m not sure that the author of the linked blog entry believes otherwise. (And if he does, then he’s wrong. :) When providing access via those alternate addresses, you just need to send a 301 header so that it’s clear to all compliant clients that the originally-entered URL is deprecated.