Re: Towards a consistent naming of W3C subdirectories

2009/7/1 Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>:
>
> On 1 Jul 2009, at 2:56 PM, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
>
>> 2009/7/1 Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>:
>>>
>>> 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
>>
>> Most of time you need the same pages time over time, for example you
>> just need to check some WG's tracker or someother WG's blog.
>> In that case, you either use bookmarks, which may become too crowded
>> if you have to mantain a lot of addresses, or you manually type the
>> address.
>
> You shouldn't have to type addresses.

Why shouldn't you?
Or actually, why do we have addresses at all, if you don't have to
type them? Why not just UUID?

>> Normally, you just type few characters and the browser
>> automatically finds the complete URI from the history.
>> I personally type addresses everytime I need something at the www.w3.org.
>
> I'm sorry to hear that. I hope the new site makes it possible for you to
> avoid
> typing URIs.

You cannot do anything to that, because I access pages without
starting from the main page and following links. I just want to go
straight to specific resources, and the easiest way is to type the
address.

>
>>
>> In addition, you need to type URIs if you write them on emails,
>> twitters, et similia. It is easier to remember
>> <http://www.w3.org/Join/AsInvitedExpert> than
>> <http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/ieapp/>, and sure you don't want to
>> say to your colleague "goto to w3c home page, type 'invited expert
>> application' in the search field and hope for the better"
>>
>> That was from an usability point of view. The other point is that it
>> looks better.
>
> Agreed that shorter is better. :)

Happy to see we agree on this.

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

Giovanni

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 20:51:23 UTC