Adam Taft wrote:
Erik Hetzner wrote:
You beat me to it! Just to add, the RWS book suggests using commas for
ordered pairs in the URI design section, which makes sense to me.
Really?? That's weird. Wrong even?
Not entirely - RWS only suggests it for pairing elements at the same
level of hierarchy.
I mean, if you can (or should) use commas, we'd have urls like this:
/cars,ford,truck,f-series,f150,2007
instead of
/cars/ford/truck/f-series/f150/2007
I like the second (with slashes) because it's somewhat a metaphor for
traditional folders on a hard drive. Which is why it's also congruent
with a web server serving a static folder hierarchy.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter what your delimiter is. I just think
slashes seem more intuitive for this type of "ordered" or "hierarchical"
usage.
Ordered does not necessarily mean hierarchical. The example in the book
is latitude and longitude. Neither is the parent of the other, but to
differentiate them easily we use a convention that puts them in a
particular order.
Likewise I think "from language" and "to language" are not hierarchical,
you could just as easily order them the other way.
Regards,
Michael.
