Tags: names

The Origin of Online Handles - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

My secret is safe.

Antidepressants or Tolkien

This is harder than it sounds. I got 19 out of 24.

Naming things needn’t be hard - Classnames

A handy resource from Paul:

Find inspiration for naming things – be that HTML classes, CSS properties or JavaScript functions – using these lists of useful words.

In new AI hype frenzy, tech is applying the label to everything now

Today’s AI promoters are trying to have it both ways: They insist that AI is crossing a profound boundary into untrodden territory with unfathomable risks. But they also define AI so broadly as to include almost any large-scale, statistically-driven computer program.

Under this definition, everything from the Google search engine to the iPhone’s face-recognition unlocking tool to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm is already “AI-driven” — and has been for years.

I’ve always liked the idea that your website can be your API. Like, you’ve already got URLs to identify resources, so why not make that URL structure predictable and those resources parsable?

That’s why the (read-only) API for The Session doesn’t live at a separate subdomain. It uses the same URL structure as the regular site, but you can request the resources in an alternative format: JSON, XML, RSS.

This works out pretty well, mostly because I put a lot of thought into the URL structure of the site. I’m something of a URL fetishist, but I think that taking a URL-first approach to information architecture can be a good exercise.

Most of the resources on The Session involve nouns like tunes, events, discussions, and so on. There’s a consistent and predictable structure to the URLs for those sections:

• /things
• /things/new
• /things/search

And then an idividual item can be found at:

• things/ID

That’s all nice and predictable and the naming of the URLs matches what you’d expect to find:

• tunes
• tunes/new
• tunes/search?q=Ireland
• tunes/320

Tunes, events, discussions, sessions. Those are all fine. But there’s one section of the site that has this root URL:

/recordings

When I was coming up with the URL structure twenty years ago, it was clear what you’d find there: track listings for albums of music. No one would’ve expected to find actual recordings of music available to listen to on-demand. The bandwidth constraints and technical limitations of the time made that clear.

Two decades on, the situation has changed. Now someone new to the site might well expect to hit a link called “recordings” and expect to hear actual recordings of music.

So I should probably change the label on the link. I don’t think “albums” is quite right—what even is an album any more? The word “discography” is probably the most appropriate label.

Here’s my dilemma: if I update the label, should I also update the URL structure?

Right now, the section of the site with /tunes URLs is labelled “tunes”. The section of the site with /events URLs is labelled “events”. Currently the section of the site with /recordings URLs is labelled “recordings”, but may soon be labelled “discography”.

If you click on “tunes”, you end up at /tunes. But if you click on “discography”, you end up at /recordings.

Is that okay? Am I the only one that would be bothered by that?

I could update the URLs to match the labelling (with redirects for the old URLs, of course), but I’m not so keen on this URL structure:

• /discography
• /discography/new
• /discography/search
• /discography/ID

It doesn’t seem as tidy as:

• /recordings
• /recordings/new
• /recordings/search
• /recordings/ID

But if I don’t update the URLs to match the label, then I’m just going to have to live with the mismatch.

I’m just thinking out loud here. I think I should definitely update the label. I just won’t make any decision on changing URLs for a while yet.

s13e17: A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More

When Dan wrote this a week ago, I thought it sounded very far-fetched. Now it sounds almost inevitable.

What are “unusual characters” – Terence Eden’s Blog

Be liberal in what you accept:

Basically, if your form can’t register Beyoncé – it has failed.

So Many Food Trucks!

Puntastic!

What’s in a name? | Sarah Higley

This is a terrific explanation of the concept of accessible names in HTML, written with verve and style!

Contrary to what you may think, naming an element involves neither a birth certificate nor the HTML name attribute. The name attribute is never directly exposed to the user, and is used only when submitting forms. Birth certificates have thus far been ignored by spec authors as a potential method for naming controls, but perhaps when web UI becomes sentient and self-propagating, we’ll need to revisit that.

Open UI

An interesting project that will research and document the language used across different design systems to name similar components.

German Naming Convention

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

The Web Developer’s Guide to DNS | RJ Zaworski

At Codebar the other night, I was doing an intro chat with some beginners. At one point I touched on DNS. This explanation is great for detailing what’s going on under the hood.

Let’s talk about usernames

This post goes into specifics on Django, but the broader points apply no matter what your tech stack. I’m relieved to find out that The Session is using the tripartite identity pattern (although Huffduffer, alas, isn’t):

What we really want in terms of identifying users is some combination of:

1. System-level identifier, suitable for use as a target of foreign keys in our database
2. Login identifier, suitable for use in performing a credential check
3. Public identity, suitable for displaying to other users

Many systems ask the username to fulfill all three of these roles, which is probably wrong.

Namespaces - daverupert.com

Sometimes our job titles and distinctions feel like the plastic grass in a sushi bento; flimsy and only there for decoration.

Kiss My Classname - Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

I understand how bloated and non-reusable code can get when a dozen people who don’t talk to each other work on it over a period of years. I don’t believe the problem is the principle of semantic markup or the cascade in CSS. I believe the problem is a dozen people working on something without talking to each other.

Domain Stories | Citizen Ex

The fascinating tales behind Top Level Domains as part of James and Nat’s Citizen Ex project. So far there’s .scot, .cymru, and .ly, with more to come.

Culture Ship Randomizer · A gravitas free zone.

For when you just have to name something after a Culture General Systems Vehicle …or maybe a General Contact Unit.

Someone tell Elon.

Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS [CSS Working Group Wiki]

I think I concur with this list. Although I guess it’s worth remembering that, given the size of the CSS spec, this isn’t an overly-long list.

It’s interesting that quite a few of them are about how things are named. It’s almost as if that’s one of the, say, two hardest things in computer science.

What’s in a Name? | The Intercom Blog

The hitherto unnoticed connection between the names of Android phones and the names of condoms.

Personal names around the world

A terrific overview by Richard of the variations in names around the world:

How do people’s names differ around the world, and what are the implications of those differences on the design of forms, ontologies, etc. for the Web?