RE: Address Bar URI

Have to say from a pragmatic point of view that using replaceState to switch between IR and NIR (or whatever we're supposed to call them) URIs feels like bad advice for most developers

Users in older browsers are going to see (and copy and paste) one set of URIs whilst users of more modern browsers are going to see (and copy and paste) another

So you end up exposing two sets of URIs to the web and to Google et al. Google only consolidates page rank for inbound links on 301s (and not 302s or 303s) so you'd end up throwing your findability away for an esoteric distinction that no-one quite understands. Or understands but doesn't quite agree with :-)

For now cross browser support for pushState and replaceState is pretty shonky [1]. It's useful when product managers demand an "app like experience" because you can do all the shiny ajax stuff without nasty ajax #s and it all looks good on their iDevices. They don't need to know that's not what most people see :-)

With apologies for bringing up S*E*O on a Friday evening. And that aside it just feels like asking people to add more complexity to sidestep existing complexity that they don't understand / see the need for in the first place.....


[1] http://caniuse.com/#search=replaceState


-----Original Message-----
From: public-lod-request@w3.org on behalf of Hugh Glaser
Sent: Fri 10/14/2011 4:22 PM
To: Norman Gray
Cc: Linking Open Data; Don Cruickshank
Subject: Re: Address Bar URI
 
I am really no expert - really, so showing my ignorance here.
I understand:

JS:
window.history.replaceState('Object', 'Title', '/another-new-url');
will do it happily, but I guess HTML5 is required.
You can use it to change path and search strings, but not protocol or domain, I understand.
 

On 14 Oct 2011, at 15:26, Norman Gray wrote:

> 
> Hugh, greetings.
> 
> On 2011 Oct 14, at 13:08, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> 
>> My colleague, Don Cruickshank asked me if it was good practice to rewrite the URI in the Address Bar to be the NIR, rather than the IR.
>> I was surprised, but he tells me that it is permitted in HTML5.
> 
> Can you expand on this a little?
> 
> Is this some HTML5 cleverness that lets one declare in the HTML what the address bar should display?  Or is it some Javascript kludge^Wgadget that does it, in which case what is the sense in which this is 'permitted' in HTML5 and wasn't before?
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Norman
> 
> 
> -- 
> Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
> 

-- 
Hugh Glaser,  
              Web and Internet Science
              Electronics and Computer Science,
              University of Southampton,
              Southampton SO17 1BJ
Work: +44 23 8059 3670, Fax: +44 23 8059 3045
Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155 , Home: +44 23 8061 5652
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~hg/




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