Cool interfaces hide URIs

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Karl Dubost wrote:

> QA Activity has published two W3C Notes: CHIPs and CUAP

There are several CHIPs checkpoints that talk about visual formatting
of URIs. It surprises me that QA WG (or anybody) still cares how URIs
look. The whole "use meaningless but easy to remember URIs" rhetoric
seems to lack real-world foundation.

While cool URIs may not change, cool interfaces do not force users to
type URIs and, hence, it is not that important how those URIs "look".
Cool interfaces use other means like page titles and links to present
resource pointers to users, and computers do not care how URIs look as
long as the URI "works". Document <title>s are for humans, URIs are
for computers.

With the exception of domain names (which are not even URIs), how many
users still have to type URIs by hand? Bookmarks and links of various
kinds make that awkward and unnecessary. Moreover, isn't it a
violation of Web Accessibility guidelines to talk about specific
visual appearance of URIs without talking about how URIs should sound,
for example?

Without much hope, I would suggest that arbitrary requirements related
to URIs "look" are removed.

Alex.

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Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2003 16:40:15 UTC