- From: Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 16:08:07 -0500
- To: <www-tag@w3.org>
Just my two cents on this subject (and it is a subject that is of significant interest to me, see my signature) TAG may has established what is correct and what is not correct about meta data in URIs, but I personally think that finding is a bit unrealistic. Yes, if you are dealing with professional developers and IT folk, but not with the general public. Even though technical professionals really want the URLs to be opaque, real world people are creating URLs and real world people are seeing and using URLs every day. The more they come in contact with URL the more they will believe that URLs have meaning and the more they come to rely on that meaning. As such I think it is ivory-towerish and a bit out-of-touch to say they shouldn't rely on meaning in URLs. Saying people shouldn't infer meaning isn't going to make them stop. This is a social issue, not a technical one. I think it will be a lot better to try and come up with as many ways as possible that they can metadata safely rather than prohibit it entirely (and this is an issue I plan to address on an ongoing basis at http://blog.welldesignedurls.org/) It's a bit like saying the it's against the law for teenagers to drink alcohol and having a belief that it is immoral for them to do so. There may be a law and it may be immoral, but it's not going to stop teenagers from drinking alcohol. Better to address the problem via other methods than just rely on stated prohibition. As I said, just my two cents worth. -Mike Schinkel http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/ http://www.welldesignedurls.org/
Received on Thursday, 9 November 2006 21:08:36 UTC