Re: Towards a consistent naming of W3C subdirectories

On 1 Jul 2009, at 12:53 PM, Giovanni Campagna wrote:

> 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.


Hi Giovanni,

While consistent URIs are nice, they should not be required. People
should reach pages through search engines or by following links, not
by having remember URIs.

I hope that the new site makes it easier to find information, without  
needing
to worry about URIs.

  _ Ian

>
> 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)
>

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 19:23:48 UTC