RE: QA Tips: Make readable URIs

Hi Karl

> 
> Le 18 sept. 2003, à 12:56, Alex Rousskov a écrit :
> > 	- ease of typing
> > 	- ease of pronouncing (for those who cannot type)
> > 	- ease of remembering
> > 	- meaning (or lack of it)

These are suggestions I make strongly to my users.  Whilst admitting to
being an English-only speaker (my French & Russian will just about allow me
to order a meal) this advice is good for English speakers, and irrelevant in
some languages and arguably dangerous in others (if one of my innocuous
words is a swear word in another language, for example).

However I would argue that this approach is better in most cases than
having, say, a set of random characters which won't be of benefit to anyone.


I suspect this isn't what you are saying, though.

Would the comments you made be addressed by including in the QA Tips a
statement along the lines

"You should be aware that URIs which are memorable in the native language
may be meaningless or misleading in other languages.  You may need to give
thoughts to such issues, especially if your resource is intended for an
international audience."

Thinking some more on this, there is the language issue for URIs in
multilingual or bi-lingual countries.  There is a paper on various issues
for Web sites in Wales (Welsh and English languages). See
Bilingual usability of unitary authority Web sites in Wales. Cunliffe, D.
Proceedings of The Web in Public Administration, EuroWeb 2001 Conference, O.
Signore and B. Hopgood (Eds.), Pisa, Italy, December 2001, 229-244. ISBN
88-88327-33-9.  Paper (PDF format) linked in from
<http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/~Daniel.Cunliffe/bilingual/wales.htm>.

Brian
 
> hmmm :) Alex you have european origins. You have a different 
> alphabet than most americans or english people. We are at 
> least using an alphabet which is similar though.
> 
> This tip apply right now in a very narrow domain which is
> 	- anglo-saxon speaker
> 	- latine alphabet writers (extended)
> 
> It doesn't make sense anymore in chinese, korean, etc, since 
> the IRI are not widely deployed. And an URI in chinese would 
> not be understandable by a english person, even if the 
> content of the page is actually in english.
> 
> URIs are opaque. There are finer considerations too, like 
> same language, but different cultural background which gives 
> different meanings for words.
> 
> Without going deeply in the philosophy of it and not being 
> extremist, I do use URIs I can remember, and I may think 
> would be easy for other people, but it doesn't mean I'm right 
> and it doesn't mean that people can remember them.
> 
> http://www.example.org/translation/
> 
> 	is a page about:
> 
>       1: a written communication in a second language having 
> the same meaning as the written communication in a first language
>            [syn: {interlingual rendition}, {rendering}, {version}] OR
>       2: a uniform movement without rotation
> 
> In french it will be only the second meaning. because the 
> first one is traduction
> 	http://www.example.org/traduction/
> 
> hmmm what should I understand of the URI? only a guess. This 
> is without mentionning words which become rude in other languages.
> 
> :))) so I think, we have to be very careful and it's the 
> occasion to raise these issues to people.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
> W3C Conformance Manager
> *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***
> 
>

Received on Friday, 23 January 2004 11:27:37 UTC