Best Practice: Always ID your Heading Tags
Here’s a simple best practice. Always ID your heading tags! For example, if you’ve got an <h2> element, be sure to make it <h2 id=”some-heading”>. IDing heading tags is especially important...
View ArticleBitten by the URI Opacity Axiom
Jon Udel has a post today entitled Divergent citation-indexing paths. Funny that he wrote about this; it seems he and I are on such a parallel trajectory these days. For evidence, take a look at my...
View ArticleWhich is Worst: the URL for IE7 Add-ons, Firefox Extensions, or Greasemonkey?
I am working on a project that had me was writing about browser plug-ins and I needed to link to the main page for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Add-ons, for Firefox’s Extensions, and lastly for...
View ArticleURLs for Multilingual Web Sites
Another URLian has appeared: Brad Fults. Brad just added himself to our wiki and became a signatory; thanks Brad! Better yet, on his user page on our wiki he linked to his post Designing URLs for...
View ArticleUse rel=”spam” to Fight Comment Spam?
As I was going through my Akismet spam filter today reviewing the 87 comment spam I got during the prior ~24 hours to ensure I didn’t delete any legitimate comments, it occurred to me that maybe there...
View ArticlePayPal’s New API: So Close, Yet So Far
I got an email from the PayPal Developer Network today announcing PayPal’s new “NVP” (or “Name-Value Pair“) API. Clearly they’ve learned that the complexity of SOAP is counter productive to adoption....
View ArticleURLQuiz #1: To .WWW or not to .WWW?
As promised, this is the first of what will be many URLQuizes here are the blog for The Well Designed URLs Initiative. This URLQuiz discusses the convention of using a subdomain with the name ‘www‘ to...
View ArticlePageRank
SEO: Illuminating the value of URL design If you’ve read many of our other posts here at The Well Designed URLs Initiative, you know that we are strong advocates for User-Centered URL Design as well as...
View ArticleASPnix Supports URL Rewriting
After a long thread over at the forums for the web host ASPnix who specializes in Community Server where customers were clamoring for URL rewriting capability, ASPnix finally announced that it will now...
View ArticleAn Embarrassment of Riches!
Wow. Over the past several days there have been numerous articles about URL design in one format or another, so much so that I’ve not been able to comment on them all in a reasonable amount of time....
View ArticleSorry Mark; URL Design DOES matter!
I was planning to blog something else today, but Mark Nottingham of Yahoo made a statement about URL Design [1] in his post entitled REST Issues, Real and Imagined and I simply could not let his...
View ArticleURLQuiz #2: URL Equivalence and Cachability
This is quiz #2 of our ongoing URLQuiz series. In this quiz, there are 26 pairs of URLs (A..Z) and for each pair the questions is: “Which of these two URLs are equivlent?” i.e. which return the same...
View ArticleURL Quote #1: A URL is like a big “YOU ARE HERE” sign
“A URL is like a big “YOU ARE HERE” sign for each page of your site. It should allow people to get a sense of where they are in your site, even if they decide not to use that information for...
View ArticleURL Quote #2: Think about your website’s “public face.”
“…one should take an hour or so and really think about their website’s ‘public face.’” -Scott Hanselman on “A Website’s Public Face“
View ArticleURL Quote #3: Wikipedia’s URLs a reason for their success?
“Wikipedia’s URL spaces are highly elegant; I suspect it’s one of the reason’s Wikipdedia is successful” -Bill de hOra on “Wikipedia’s Highly Elegant URLs“
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Proposing HTTP Request Forwarding
I’ve been monitoring the ietf-http-wg mailing list and have noticed there is renewed actively around revising RFC 2616, the HTTP/1.1 specification. This renewed activity got me thinking it was time to...
View ArticleWhy URL design matters in email
I’ve long believed email provides one of the better justifications for good URL design. Having a well designed URL structure inspires a user to have faith in a site’s URL integrity making it more...
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Seeing things the way in which one wants them to be (not the way they are)
Throughout history there have been people who only saw things as they wanted them to be. People with strongly held beliefs whose values guided their actions be they counter-productive, detrimental, or...
View ArticleURL Quote #4: An utter disaster to disable the URL
“Given that social filtering is one of the most powerful mechanisms for information discovery on the Internet, it is an utter disaster to disable the URL as an addressing mechanism. “ -Jakob Nielsen on...
View ArticleWhy SnipURL’s API is Unsafe a.k.a. How NOT to design your Web API
Sigh. If you’ve read my blog, you know that I like well designed URLs. You’ve probably also discerned that I like web APIs with well designed URLs. And further you might be aware that I like APIs that...
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