Derek,
Please add the reference/link for why URLs in Cocoon should not
have an extension - I know its required, but why is it "bad"?
It's not specific to Cocoon. I only mentioned that because Cocoon's
sitemap makes it particularly easy to map a URL without an extension to
some content.
So in general, it is not a good idea to include extensions in a URL if
you want that URL to be useful for a long time to come. The extension
may contain implementation specific details which may not always be
true. It's generally considered better to publish a generic URL and
then let the browser use content negotiation to determine whether it can
accept that content. For example, what if your organization regularly
published an important document as a Microsoft Word file (*.doc) and
published it on your site with a URL of:
http://myorg.org/importantdocs/thisweek.doc
That's great and you would probably bookmark it and everything would be
fine... until your organization decided to move with the times and
publish it as a styled xml document. Now you have a dilemma... do you
change the url so it contains a .xml extension and risk losing your
loyal followers (whose bookmarks no longer work) or do you keep the same
url which ends in .doc but is actually an xml file?
A great resource for all this is the W3C's own Cool URIs [1] page.
There are a lot of other url advocates out there like this one [2].
I suppose though, if you are talking about downloads this might all be a
bit academic. After all if you want to download an executable file the
chances are it will remain in the same format forever... but you should
at least spend half a second thinking about the format of the URL you
expose it with.
Regards,
David Legg
[1] http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI#remove
[2] http://blog.welldesignedurls.org/
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