Mike on URIs

Mike finds cruft-free URI religion. I left a rambly comment on the post. How Mike is doing searches is incidentally how the WP search system works, it redirects you if there’s only one hit. However without a message explaining the redirection like he has I could see where that behaviour could be confusing. Flashback: Cruft-free URIs in WP 1.0. People who think the effort we put into URIs was for Google are wrong. Addresses are an issue of long-term viability, accessibility, and usability. (There’s an undeniable aesthetic factor as well.) Much of my thinking on was influenced by Matthew Thomas (mpt) who is now the resident WordPress usability guru. He choose WP based partly on its address structure. WordPress is still the only system I know of that is a copy-and-paste away from cruft-free out of the box. (Yes, file extensions are cruft.)

2 thoughts on “Mike on URIs

  1. Like any standard way of doing something, it’ll change eventually. Why not consciously choose an identifier to indicate a version of your url structure. For example:

    v1/archive/2004/08/06/url_versioning

    or

    archive1/2004/08/06/url_versioning

    The intent being to provide a logical unique key such as ‘v1’ or ‘archive1’ where the sole purpose is to identify the url structure that follows the key.

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