Re: Identification of documents in Web applications

On 3/9/2011 3:37 PM, Jeni Tennison wrote:
> I don't understand why we should particularly pick on the
 > query as an alternative to the fragment identifier? (Oh, I
 > see that in Noah's original suggestion, he did say 'and perhaps
 > other parts of a URI'.)

Good catch, you're absolutely right, and I've updated the last section of 
the blog posting at [1]. To paraphrase your point, I had created a false 
dichotomy between "#" and "?"; the interesting choice is whether or not to 
use fragments. Once you decide not to then, as you say, the syntactic 
mechanisms of RFC 3986 should be used in the intended manner, with the path 
component for hierarchial identification and/or query strings for 
non-hierarchical.

The main point stands, however: I continue to claim that URIs with 
fragments are, in the long term, likely to have the problems we see with 
hasb-bang; conversely, once changes like the HTML5 history API are 
deployed, URIs without fragments can be used at the client and at the 
server, with control available over when page loads occur. I believe that 
such non-fragment URIs will continue, in most cases, to be the right ones 
to use for Web documents, whether or not an Ajax client is used to present 
those documents.

Noah

[1] 
http://blog.arcanedomain.com/2011/03/identifying-documents-in-web-applications/

Received on Thursday, 10 March 2011 15:29:44 UTC