Re: QA Tips: Make readable URIs

Le mar 17/08/2004 à 04:45, olivier Thereaux a écrit :
> One question I am asking myself (and would like the opinions of www-qa 
> readers) is whether the language suffix should be before or after
> the file suffix.

The order of the extensions decides the types of negotiation you'll be
able to do; it only really matters in the (probably rare) case where
you're doing content and language negotiation at the same time - that
is, as far as I understand.

For instance, if you have a document in HTML and in XML, available both
in English and French, if you use foo.format.language, you can make
links to a specific format with an unspecified language (using
foo.format), while using foo.language.format, you can make links to a
specific language in an unspecified format using foo.language.
In both cases, the negotiation done one "foo" alone will deal first with
the format, and then with the language.

In practice, most of the cases concern language negotiation alone, and
as far as I know, the preference is mostly due to authoring conditions
in a local environment:
- you may prefer foo.format.language because it is clearer (e.g. in a
file list) that foo.html.en and foo.html.fr are the variant of the same
resource "foo.html"
- you may prefer foo.language.format, because some operating systems use
the right-most extension to determine the MIME Type of a file, and thus
foo.format.language wouldn't be recognized as of type "format".

But you're right that in the language negotiation context, it's also
good to be able to point too foo.language for a specific language
version, without giving the .format extension. But all in all, this is
really an Apache implementation detail more than an architectural
principle :)

HTH,

Dom
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/ERCIM
mailto:dom@w3.org