Towards a consistent naming of W3C subdirectories

I've been following the work on the new version of the W3C site for a
while, and I noticed that almost all the WG home pages, as well as
other pages with dated URIs or other weirdness are not currently
working.
I expected that being caused by the refactoring and resulting into new
sensible path component. I sent this email to make sure this happens.

As an example, now we have /Style/CSS for CSS WG, but /html/wg for
HTML WG and /2001/tag for the TAG or /2001/sw for the Semantic Web
Activity.

I think there are three models to solve this:
1- /WG/CSS, /TAG, /activities/SemanticWeb, /IG/Math, /XG/ModelBasedUI
I.e., one (virtual) directory for kind of group, followed by the group name

2- /Style/CSS, /TAG, /SemanticWeb/SWDeployment, /Markup/HTML,
/RWC/WebApps, /Incubator/ModelBasedUI
I.e. one (virtual) directory for Activity, followed by the group name

3- /1996/CSS, /2001/TAG, /2001/SemanticWeb, /2007/HTML, /2008/WebApps,
/2008/ModelBasedUI, /2007/XHTML2
I.e. the group name, associated with the year of start

All group names should be consistenly CamelCased if possible (but I
know that W3C servers are case-instensitive)

Of the three possibility, I personally favor number one, because
dropping the short name could bring to the list of currently active
working groups (one of the most difficult pages to reach, probably,
together with the list of TR ordered by working group).
Dropping the short name from 2 could give directly the activity page,
but I suppose that every WG will keep a link to its Activity (and
every Activity to its Domain), and people often want to group by
technology, rather than by activity.
Option n°3 is the one I dislike most, because currently
http://www.w3.org/XXXX is member / team only and thus completely
useless.

I know that the W3C has URI persistence policies, but you can still
keep the old link and set a 301 Moved Permantly redirect to the new
location. Also, most URIs are not covered by those policies.

Hope that this proposal will be accepted,

Giovanni Campagna

PS: sending this because I saw
<http://beta.w3.org/2004/08/invexp.html> which should be
<http://beta.w3.org/Consortium/invexp> or
<http://beta.w3.org/Partecipation/invexp> (without the html suffix)

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 17:54:21 UTC