The URI is the thing

Here’s what’s on my desk at work: an iMac (with keyboard, mouse and USB cup warmer), some paper, pens, a few books and an A4-sized copy of Paul Downey’s The URI Is The Thing—an intricately-detailed Boschian map of all things RESTful. It’s released under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to download the PDF from archive.org, print it out and keep it on your own desk.

I love good URL design. I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement with just about every point in this great piece on URL design:

URLs are universal. They work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, cURL, wget, your iPhone, Android and even written down on sticky notes. They are the one universal syntax of the web. Don’t take that for granted.

That’s why I feel so disappointed and sad when I see previously-robust URLs swapped out for the fragile #! fragment identifiers. I find it hard to articulate my sadness, but it’s related to what Ben said in his comment to Nicholas’s article on how many users have JavaScript disabled:

The truth is that if site content doesn’t load through curl it’s broken.

Or, as Simon put it:

The Web for me is still URLs and HTML. I don’t want a Web which can only be understood by running a JavaScript interpreter against it.

If I copy and paste the URL of that tweet, I get http://twitter.com/#!/simonw/status/25696723761 …which requires a JavaScript interpreter to resolve.

Fortunately, those fragile Twitter URLs will be replaced with proper robust identifiers if this demo by Twitter engineer Ben Cherry is anything to go by. It’s an illustration of saner HTML5 history management using the history.pushState method.

danwebb.net - It’s About The Hashbangs

A superb post by Dan on the bigger picture of what’s wrong with hashbang URLs. Well written and well reasoned.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Broken Links

Tim Bray calmly explains why hash-bang URLs are a very bad idea.

This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.

isolani - Javascript: Breaking the Web with hash-bangs

Excellent, excellent analysis of how URLs based on fragment identifier (a la Twitter/Gawker/Lifehawker) expose an unstable tottering edifice that crumbles at the first JavaScript error.

So why use a hash-bang if it’s an artificial URL, and a URL that needs to be reformatted before it points to a proper URL that actually returns content?

Out of all the reasons, the strongest one is “Because it’s cool”. I said strongest not strong.

The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)

I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:

This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.

And they all have.

And they are all different.

Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.