URLs suck
created 06 August 2007 in blog tagged philosophy, urls and web.
jerakeen.org contains just about everything I produce, and I try to use sensible urls - every page has a unique url, of the form /category/slug/ or /category/yyyy/mm/dd/slug/. The index for a category is just /category/. Pages have tags, and you can see all pages belonging to a tag at /tags/tagname/ as well. You can search using /search?q=search_term. Finally, you can get a feed of any category at a /category-name/feed page.
Enough back-story. This system is just about sensible, but only because it’s so simple, and even then there are odd bits. For instance, why category/feed? Why not feed/category? Why does the search page have a CGI parameter in it, but not the tag pages? Suppose I wanted an RSS feed of pages tagged with ‘python’, what would that URL look like? /feed/tag/python? /tag/python/feed/? Feed types are not sub-headings under categories. The single-page permalinks make sense, but why do they encode only the category, date and slug? Why not the tags?