Matthew Somerville wrote: > David Greaves wrote: >> You want an 8am train from Cardiff to Birmingham? >> >> http://www.traintimes.org.uk/8:00/cardiff/birmingham >> >> The requested URL /8:00/cardiff/birmingham was not found on this server. > > Hmm, works fine here. ;-) Ho Ho!!
Been using the site for years BTW :) >> <sigh> people are so complicated... > > Well, all you had to do was ask. ;) OK : Could you please simplify people - all of them. Make them understand what I wanted them to understand when I first thought of the idea. Cheers. Just in case...I meant that if you (or I) think of an idea or a hierarchy in a nice logical way like so: > The reason it's as it is by default, by the way, is because URLs are > hierarchical, and it's pretty pointless to supply a time without a from > or a to (whereas cutting any bit off a default URL returns what you'd > expect). then some silly bugger like me will think about it in an entirely different way: (see above URL) > The front page gives the "manual", such as it is. I think it is an excellent solution - however it's a solution to a different problem. I think your URL is actually a user interface; ie designed to be a primary data entry mechanism for a search or similar (which is cool). Most URLs are not really designed for humans to use. They are essentially simply uncompressed tinyURLs. Many URLs are actually informative but a quick look at the 33 pages I have open: * line-noise 18 * grokable 15 I don't think I could, with any certainty, have typed the displayed URL into *any* of them to get what I was seeing. They're not data entry fields. > Another site I've done, http://landmarktrust.dracos.co.uk/ uses a > key=value URL structure, so that it doesn't matter in what order the > variables are presented. Yep, IIRC I used that for BTexact's site a few years back. I notice the URLs in http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ are not so easy to comprehend (not a criticism - just an example of a more complex problem that doesn't succumb). >> TinyURL is clever - it's small and easy to *transcribe*. > > Well, unless you can get 1 and l, or O and 0 confused. :) Oh, I'm sure it can be improved. (Yes, it astonishes me that things like MS product keys (not seen one for a couple of years but...) still use 0s and Os - and the only difference in the printed version is the roundedness of the font!!!!) Anyhow... URLs are clearly primarily designed as a machine readable bookmark - either to a process point (sessions) or an information heirarchy/database location (wikis, shops, blogs, forums, datastores) They are, in the main, no longer expected to be typed. (What % of urls that you visit do you actually type - shortcuts *not* included!) For the rare occasion we need to type (transcribe) then I'd suggest that tinyURLs are a better UI than informative URLs. They have less chance of transcription error (both because they're shorter and because the user doesn't think they know how to spell). Interesting discussion :) David - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
