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Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com
Tue Feb 16 22:56:30 GMT 2021
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On 16-Feb-2021 20:58, Sandra Snan wrote:
I don't wanna disagree with someone who is in my own corner on this♥,
but…Its an interesting topic - and I'm sure there is a lot of prior thought on this we get to rehash for fun here.
It's tree semantics, which is evidenced in practice by the way relative
links work. (Especially since .. and co exist).Yes I do agree the relative link resolving semantics are tree-like, but that's all, and its not much. Relative path creation is a server side act so the URL semantics is still determined by the server/content author.
I was thinking more in terms of the content or URL semantics as in what is the expected meaning of the "parent" fragment in respect of the "child"
The content semantics may not be tree like in the pleasant way we see when serving a file system file and folder structure.
/foo/ may not be any kind of meaningful container of /foo/bar and foo/baz - we can't assume it is the more generic location.
We may imagine a perfectly valid URL /westminster/london/uk - that might make sense for a certain type of application. It is sort of upside down from a classical geographic point of view, so the domain semantics may not map onto the url fragmentation. That is sort of what I had in mind, that we cannot infer much about the domain semantics from the url structure.
Similarly an opaque URL /dhjksfl/sueyug/sodfye - its only tree like in respect of relative path resolution. The domain semantics of the path fragments in this case are almost completely opaque. /foo/bar/baz may seem to have more semantics, but it has the same behaviour. Hence I do think this is in the realm of pragmatics of use and conventions.
We like to look at a URL and hope it is more sensible - and some clients implement an "up" feature to go up the path. But what you get in general as you do so is anyone's guess. But day to day conventions and pragmatics usually are strong enough that this sort of thing usually works.
Regards
 - Luke