Re: best URL format

Ganesh J. Acharya wrote:
> correction
> is example.com/arch/web-meet-2013 
> <http://example.com/web-arch/web-meet-2013> better 
> than example.com/building-arch/web-meet-2013 
> <http://example.com/building-arch/web-meet-2013>

None of the visible forms of the URL are absolute.  They all differ from 
the machine readable form.  If the intent is have something that can be 
manually re-keyed, I believe you should have the http:// part as well. 
I know that modern browsers will infer that and some even trim out the 
http:// in the user interface display.  At the very minimum, I would 
keep the //.

If the intent is not for re-keying, the user should not be seeing the 
URL, unless they use a diagnostic mode.  If this is for use in print, I 
would use the style in which Thunderbird rendered this to plain text, 
but using a plain text link name before the <>.

What is more important than length is the ability to commit it, in 
pieces, to short term memory, so a cryptic, but very short form, could 
be worse than a longer form made up of real words.  The time needed to 
type it is also a consideration.

In my personal view, if you use a very short form, it should be an alias 
to a form that is properly structured.  Moreover, in my view, it should 
be possible to manually trim components from the right and still have a 
valid URL, not an access denied message.

Incidentally, I recently had a machine generated email which used the 
http://-less form for both the human and machine readable parts. 
Thunderbird couldn't treat it as a relative mailto URI and wasn't 
prepared to treat it as an http: one.


> *
> "Terms & Conditions
> Disclaimer: The contents of this e-mail are highly confidential and may 

No they are not!


-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Sunday, 30 December 2012 12:22:55 UTC