Hi, This is more of a best practices type question that's come up for me again and again and I thought to get the community's thinking, particularly given the REST oriented discussion floating around lately. It's not specifically about Catalyst although as we further our best practices discussion I am sure this kind of issue presents itself.
I often find that the resource of a given URI can have alternative formats. For example, I might have a table of information on an html webpage and I want to offer two alternative representations, a comma separated version and an ATOM feed. According to suggestions for URI best practices, such as "http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html"; you should make your URI for the resource without a file extension, since you want to make enduring URI's and who knows if HTML will still be popular in 10 years, right? Following this thought I might do something like: FORMAT URI xhtml myapp.com/table atom myapp.com/table?format=atom cvs myapp.com/table?format=cvs Then I can create three different template toolkit views and decide between them when serializing a URL based on the format parameter, while making html the default. They all come from the same data, just a different way of seeing it, so they are all 'alternatives' to the one. However lately I've seen a lot of apps using 'flavour' style file extensions for this. Jifty makes extensive use of this and there is a Flavour plugin for Catalyst. So instead of the above you'd do: FORMAT URI xhtml myapp.com/table (default) xhtml myapp.com/table.html atom myapp.com/table.atom cvs myapp.com/table.cvs I can see advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. For the first method you get the clear url, but the format parameter might be mistaken for something other than what it is. Also there is no particular standard here for making alternative representations, someone could use 'format' another might use 'view', etc whereas the second method has a clear standard. So, what are you all doing to handle this? Has the 'cool urls don't have file extensions' school of though fallen out of favor? Has someone found a better way, or a compelling reason to choose one over the other? --John ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ List: [email protected] Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
