There's also the locality aspect of the problem which is unaddressed. Typically humans resolve ambiguity in a finite namespace. E.g. there are only a few Bob's I know of. If a single human were asked to resolve of a bob without context it would be a hard to resolve problem. I think all naming resolution problem are related to identification on the basis of attributes, and a url in a certain sense is supposed to model enough attributes to help us resolve this. We have modeled systems unlike humans, not with distributed and local information but looking at url resolution using a central brain of sorts.
Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
141–150 of 157 posts
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#142in the article:
/shelf/{something}
{something} could be a name - 'american literature' {something} could be an identifier - '20211fcf-0116-4217-9816-be11a4954344'
if someone calls:
https://library.com/locations: { "kind": "Shelf", "name": "20211fcf-0116-4217-9816-be11a4954344", }
now we have a shelf named with the id of a different shelf
and the meaning of
/shelf/20211fcf-0116-4217-9816-be11a4954344/book
is now ambiguous
i don't know a great way to avoid this
this is unambiguous, but i don't think my co-workers would like it: /shelf/name/{id}/books /shelf/id/{id}/books
I think this would only be slightly more popular
/shelf/name/{id}/books /shelf/{id}/books
because the thing after shelf/ would not consistently be an id
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kinda funny you mention that Google will kill the url. For at least the past decade, advertisement in Japan has been showing people which search term to enter to find the website instead of a url.
I can't tell if that's a worse idea than QR codes of URLs.
You have to remember that broad support for Japanese characters in URLs are a fairly recent, and haven't really caught on.
So advertisers want people to type something in their native script in order to get to the product website. So while an English advertisement campaign might tell people to go directly to johnnysmattresses.com, a Japanese campaign couldn't do this, and instead ask people to search for ジョニーの布団.
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion of surfing the web without JavaScript enabled is increasingly antiquated. You can't even log into Google without JS enabled; it's necessary to mandate it because of iframe attacks.
Not all web pages are (or at least need to be) web apps. Logging into an account vs reading a static page is apples to oranges. Mandating JS to get any content, no matter how static, seems like the start of the death of e.g. Linked Data and a the web as an open standards based platform. I know I'm in the minority but diversity is a strength, and there are few places more important than the web.
I don't see why JavaScript is antithetical to linked data. If it's because the web page can't be statically analyzed, that's a solvable problem---you dynamically execute the page in a JavaScript sandbox.
Google had to solve a similar problem to successfully index Flash content. [https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexin...]
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like it's vulnerable to some form of abuse. library.com/books/1as03jf08e/Moby-Dick/ library.com/books/1as03jf08e/Hitchhikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy Now lead to the same place...
eh. You can do that with query strings and hashes in URLS anyway. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=digikata&profile=bad-pe...
standards wise, you know the part after ? is variable though...
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#146Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
eh. You can do that with query strings and hashes in URLS anyway. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=digikata&profile=bad-pe...
standards wise, you know the part after ? is variable though...
variable? Not sure if I 100% get what you're saying, but what I know is that https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=digikataWaitNoThisOther... won't go to the same place as your user profile. There's standards, and then there's "Standards".
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't buy it. Redirecting to canonical URLs is canonicalization 101. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#4 Also, what would be an example of same-origin redirect abuse?
Bypassing black lists when posting links while still benefiting from crawlers following the links comes to mind. During the 2000s, following links for a forum or blog was way too expensive, so they had black lists of dirty words to avoid porn sites spaming and get juice during the page rank golden years where any back reference mattered. Hence it was just easier, to avoid the filters, to create non blacklisted domain…
They also tended to use usergroup permissions to restrict new users from posting URLs before they'd been a member for a certain amount of time (or posted a certain amount of messages) or had early posts subject to moderator approval if a link was included.
Never saw a lot of sites using 'innocent' URLs to sneak porn onto random internet forums in the way you describe, cause said sites would simply treat any spammed link as suspicious regardless of what it claimed to be.
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion of surfing the web without JavaScript enabled is increasingly antiquated. You can't even log into Google without JS enabled; it's necessary to mandate it because of iframe attacks.
To whom is it increasingly antiquated? Are you calling me old or what? I use uMatrix always, and allow pages i want to load JavaScript, and I try to get more and more people to do this actually when they say they have issues with bilion popups and adds. Using addblockers should be increasingly a positive trend not antiquated unless you want to part of botnet.
pop-ups and ads?
I use uBlock and I don't disable JavaScript. I don't have any issue any more.
Re: Choosing between names and identifiers in URLs
#150Something was bugging me about this, but I had to think hard to figure it out. The article is largely based on a misguided premise: the idea that URLs should be conceptualized as either names or identifiers. URLs are neither: they are addresses of web pages. The things located at the URL may have names or identifiers, but by design of the web the stuff located at an address is mutable while the address is immutable.…
> The things located at the URL may have names or identifiers, but by design of the web the stuff located at an address is mutable while the address is immutable.
But an address is a designator/identifier.