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.

Posted by Duane Gran on 7 February 02007 @ 1pm

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.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 7 February 02007 @ 1pm