To all: I just read the email about a "Spread the Semantic Web" campaign and it made me think it was important that I go ahead and present the following idea to the microformat group.
I recently started working on a project I'm calling "Well Designed Urls" (http:///www.welldesignedurls.org/) that has been a pet issue of mine for a long time. See my Aug 2005 blog post: http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blog/welldesignedurlsarebeautiful.aspx The project includes a wiki like http://www.microformats.org/wiki and planned blog and it's mission is to: 1.) Promote the use of Well Designed Urls by website owners/developers, 2.) Promote having vendors design tools that make Well Designed Urls easy to implement, 3.) Provide best practices for URL structure design and implementation, and 4.) Provide resources to make it easy to implement Web Designed Urls in web apps. I think "Well Designed Urls" have a lot of benefits in general, but I believe they especially go hand-in-hand with Microformats. The reason I see those two aligned is I believe we'll soon see an evolution towards what I'll call: Casual Web Services (think: "Structured Screen Scraping") I believe this evolution towards "Casual Web Services" will see the line between HTML web pages and REST-based web services blurring into no line at all. Since the URL structure of a REST-based web services typically becomes an important part of the API, HTML web pages will need Well Designed Urls in order to operate effectively as REST-based web services. If I am correct about this, it is important that we sooner than later start promoting Well Designed Urls as well as crystalizing a set of best practices for URL structure design. At least that my opinion and I am hoping you each concur. Thoughts? Questions? -Mike Schinkel http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blog/ P.S. One way to try and make a simple point about this is consider the "rel-tag" microformat. As per the spec: "The last path component of the URL is the text of the tag." Are you aware this is very difficult if not impossible to implement on a standard Microsoft IIS5/6-based web server using ASP, ASP.NET, or even PHP without a 3rd party product (ISAPI Rewrite is one.) Unfortunately, and I'm only going by gut feeling here, over 90% of shared hosting companies on the web will not support ISAPI Rewrite or another other clean URL solution. Shining a light on the need for good clean URL design could create enough demand that hosting companies would look for a solution. Further, it could cause Microsoft, content management software vendors, and other web app vendors to realize they really do need to incorporate clean URLs into their products and stop treating URLs as if they were both invisible and irrelevent to end users. Again, I hope you share my opinion. _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss