On Wednesday 10 January 2001 19:13, fantasai scratched this in the dirt:
> The navigational structure is a web, more or less. But a good web--
> an /organized/ web--has strong spokes for filaments to attach to,
> and those spokes are the URI hierarchy. They maintain organization,
> provide a well-defined path for navigation, and can be oriented to
> when lost.
You just hit on a critical, oft-ignored problem with the Web currently --
URI structure is often random and haphazard. Certain sites, such as sun.com,
structure things in a manner that's naturally logical to a customer --
staroffice support is located at www.sun.com/staroffice, for example.
Logical heirarchy (I'm talking READER logical, not necessarily "management"
logical) is incredibly important here.
Whether it's a filesystem or a content management system like (ugh!) Zope,
you're still going to have the same navigational and organizational issues.
However, what Zope makes a lot easier:
Implementing searching is trivial
A massive rearrangement of heirarchy is trivial
Because of Zope's ability to "acquisition" (kind of the opposite of
inheritance) properties regarding its location, it is easy to embed a
document in multiple locations, with correct inheritance depending on the URI
calling it.
I think there are some other advantages. One of these days, we may play
with it again here, but for now it burned us too bad before.
Umm, I'm really not sure what the point of this post is, other than to say
"aye" to fantasai's last comment above.
--
Matthew P. Barnson
Manager, Systems Administration
Excite@Home
