James Cridland wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/breakfast/pip/jrjen/ - good.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/breakfast/archive/07/07/10/ - better.
That's not better; URLs are supposed to be unique. Okay, Breakfast isn't a
great example for my case, but even with that, if it's ever repeated, your
URL might no longer be appropriate. I believe that is exactly why it is done
as it is, given the vast majority of programmes might be repeated, can be
part of schedules, different series, and so on.
http://www.plasticbag.org/files/misc/pips_etech.pdf describe it quite well,
by the BBC people who implemented it.
The 'jrjen' in this URL (no idea, but I suspect it's an internal ID for
the PIP system) isn't easily guessable. A date (in this case, a
backwards one) is more guessable.
PIPs aren't meant to be guessable, as far as I know. You'd almost never want
to "guess" one particular episode's unique location (again, for almost all
programmes, it'd be pretty impossible - going by your date thing, is it the
first date an episode is shown? The latest? How do I know which one I've
just listened to?); you'd come in from the daily schedule, the programme's
homepage, the series' homepage, the archive, etc., all of which *are*
guessable (I'd take the "/pip" out of the archive page, but that's minor).
Another example (from the same area):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/x9qv/ - good
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/elton_john/
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/elton_john/> - better
Okay, I can't follow that one - I guess if you had two artists of the same
name? But then I'd go with changing one of their names. ;)
> Having said that, after five days I'm understanding the reasons for why
> the URLs currently work the way they do. And I think it might be
> partially my job to fix that. Just hoping nobody notices quite yet.
It's not perfect currently, but it's certainly well designed, and removing
PIPs would in my opinion be quite a step backwards and not a "fix".
--
ATB,
Matthew | http://www.dracos.co.uk/
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