The Quality Without a Name in URLs

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I recently polled a yahoo group I am a member of to choose an example url that feels most 'right'. Of about 75 bay area engineers and architects, only 14 responded. But the results are still interesting. The tendency is for short, descriptive, lowercase urls.

The question was actually this:

if an url consists of: context + meta + page which combination below feels right to you?

url-poll.png

It was intentional to leave out any context and keep it subjective.

I asked for those who voted to respond why they chose they way they did. Here are some of the responses.

lowercase page names feels like more of a standard.I voted for the more verbose meta string because without knowing whatthe requirements of the meta data are, it's safer to create aconstruct that can scale to unforseen needs.

Lowercase page names are just much easier to read and predict, both for the authors and the users.I voted for the shorter meta string, simply because it's easier for an end-user to be able to predict where to find a file. The longer string seems to be more useful for the content developers, but I imagine that there are all sorts of useful meta tags that can be inserted into the pages themselves that can be used for searching within the content development tool.

[update: 6/8/05]

I just noticed the w3c uses mixed case. For example:

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

All the examples cited on that page are lowercase (but with no suggestion as to the authors preference).

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