Re: ::scr removing the wuh-wuh-wuh

[Ash Argent-Katwala <ash@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 20 May 2002, Simon Wistow wrote:
>I read this a while back ...
>"Removing the Ws from URLs"
>http://webword.com/moving/wwwremoval.html
>and I've been trying think of a response. 

I do the W-removing a bit differently (to cope with doing it for many
virtual servers without explicitly enumerating them) but to the same effect.
While you're there though you may want to fix advertising how the resource
is served, or the likely format of the result in the URL too. It isn't hard,
and it'll mean you've got sane URIs if you ever get bored of perl and want
to use something else, or find that the world moves on to something other
than HTML but you still have something to say about 16th century France
(and you'll content-negotiate to serve people HTML or fooML or whatever).

There are also more reasons than he lists to pull them off and rewrite
properly with full path (cheers to the BBC for http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
vs. http://bbc.co.uk/news/ behaving dopily, or even /news24/ on each host,
which they read out without the Ws). After you've pulled meaningless or
misleading extensions off your URIs realise that trailing slashes start to
really matter, and you should always forward to the one you intended (with
or without the slash for any given URI).

>Are we just stuck in the past? I remember my dad asking why he just
>can't type in 'BMW' in the location bar of his browser and it wouldn't
>just work [0] and I told him that is was because it wasn't scalable. But
>90% (he says, pulling figures out of his arse) of sites are .coms anyway
>so the root server has to cope with that and Realnames showed that it
>was technically possible until they got shafted.

It's simple to get a browser that tries a bunch of pre- and postfixes (Opera
3.61 here does it). What's hard is knowing what's the 'right site'. You
wouldn't go too far wrong to do a feeling lucky on google, but I prefer
having a little more control. If the search engine knew (learnt, was
trained, did a bit of pattern patching) what you liked (maths and crypto,
shiny things, cars, whatever) then you might feel a bit luckier.

>Should we just give in and get rid of the 'old' system? [1]

Absofragginglutely. At least pick a host and redirect the other
consistently. Keep the damn Ws if you like, but don't call yourself
PetsOvernight.com without responding to the damn request on your protocol of
choice.

>[1] yes, I know this has problems with other protocols but ...

Only if you aren't prepared to have them live at the same IP address. If you
really care make it a load balancing switch and fix it there, or do other
wierd techy things.

(Sorry, this ended up being a bit technical - but the current situation is
muppetful and it winds me up).

-- 
ash
a-k
... Because they're obviously, definitely nuts!