On 01/03/2007, at 9:31 AM, libwebdev wrote:
Hi folks,
I followed a recent thread here on how people manage their links,
and I made a request to our organisation's webmaster to allow
MultiViews for my department's website (which I manage, and which
is part of a large public organisation). I have a penchant for
short, usable URLs that don't show file names, and would like to
link to "/mydept/training/" rather than "/mydept/training.htm".
His response:
<paste>
My main concern would be with how content-negotiated links get
handled by search engines (both Google and Thunderstone).
Google sends the http accept header with text/html as its preference.
Apache will serve whatever content best matches that. Thunderstone
sends whatever accept header you set it to send, so the consequences
of that are up to you and how you set it.
There is also a potential issue if there is more than one page in a
folder that satisfies the content criteria.
Then the one the user agent prefers (indicated by it accept header)
gets sent. This concern is uselessly ambiguous, though. What kind of
situation is he imagining, exactly?
Additionally, even if we were to allow MultiViews, it is essential
that the URL in any links within the pages still be the correct
full one.
How does he define "correct" ? Any one of the possible content types
is correct depending on what user agent is requesting the page. If an
XML browser requests a page which contains "full" links to html
documents, this would be incorrect.
Given the structure of the <department> site, I am not sure that
there is any great advantage to be gained.
</paste>
what special qualities of the site's structure is he talking about here?
I'm not sure I fully understand his concerns, and wondered if
someone could enlighten me as to why he is reluctant to do this,
why it would be A Bad Thing when it seems pretty innocuous to me.
is seamless multiple language support, and seamless multiple browser
support into the future important to the company? Are clean, easy to
remember URL's important? What are the actual drawbacks? I've read
carefully though his "concerns" and he doesn't seem to specifically
state any. So, it seems to me that while he said he has concerns,
what he listed as concerns are rather strange constructed mythologies
designed to appear like concerns, but which are not.
Or perhaps I should just get over it, use *.htm everywhere, and
move on to more important issues. .. ?
lib.
You could. To play devil's advocate here, what percentage of your
target audience would be able to take real advantage of this change?
Is that percentage worth the trouble of arguing with him, and is it
worth the trouble of implementing the change?
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