💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 005317.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 16:42:49. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com
Wed Feb 17 11:37:52 GMT 2021
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On 17-Feb-2021 01:27, Sandra Snan wrote:
Luke Emmet <luke at marmaladefoo.com> writes:
We may imagine a perfectly valid URL /westminster/london/uk - that
might make sense for a certain type of application.
But I still feel you're in my corner when it comes to making my capsule
structure flat. I ended up not sending more than half of my last email
because it strayed off topic a bit (and this lists gets enough rants as
it is) but gemini://idiomdrottning.org/page-vs-capsule
I'm in the camp that you should have whatever structure you like :)
On the web I prefer simple flat-ish URL structures, probably without even any file extension. A lot of URLs expose the innards of the site (cgi-bin, *.php) implementation that is orthogonal to the URL and content naming, and I put file extensions in that bracket. How many of our visitors need to know what some site is implemented in, or it it is a database, or built from a static site generator? That is what Apache mod_rewite was made for.
Personally I'm a bit more torn about this in Gemini, as the landscape is much more spartan.
Having a link end *.pdf gives readers a very good hint as to the content at the end of the URL and it helps me make a choice - do I want to click that thing or not? Also clients can provide certain UI hints or decorations to suggest the likely content of the link with some basic URL heuristics. So in Gemini, I prefer to see a file extension in the URL.
Similarly clients can implement a simple "Up" feature which means any page does not need this intrinsic navigation. All assuming the author maps their content onto the URL structure in a sensible way.
As a visitor, we cannot expect URLs to implement any sort of tree structure, but in practice they usually do and we can traverse up and down the URL architecture as well as by following the authored links. For me this is the pragmatics of URLs.
- Luke