Rob Relyea: Url

Url progress with ASP.NET

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:41:19 GMT

I'm much too busy to be blog reading...but here I am anyway, catching up on a few of Jon Udell's latest posts. I was happy to see ".aspx considered harmful", which discusses why Urls should be minimal in order to be future proofed and to have the appropriate style/brand. He links to Scott Guthrie's October post about ASP.NET MVC Framework which "includes a very powerful URL mapping component that enables you to build applications with clean URLs".

Hyperlinks/Favorites are just middlemen for good Urls

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:36:22 GMT

It isn't good enough to have a good set of links, those links need to be nice urls, so you don't need the middleman (the hyperlink/favorite).

I've made my RobRelyea.com site more useful than it has been by making it a link directory for topics I care about. The information is more than just links, it is a set of URLs that will be easy to remember (for sharing or your own use).

Each of the major topics on my site is Url addressable:

Blog at robrelyea.com/blog
Xaml at robrelyea.com/xaml
Wpf at robrelyea.com/wpf
Urls at robrelyea.com/urls*
Data at robrelyea.com/data*
Events at robrelyea.com/events
Me at robrelyea.com/me*

* - these aren't url adressable yet...

Several of those topics also have subtopics which are Url addressable:

wpf/apps at robrelyea.com/wpf/apps
wpf/events/mix07 at robrelyea.com/events/mix07

This should make my life easier...as I'll be able to easily point people to information that I want to share.

WCF 3.5 to support REST

Thu, 31 May 2007 22:26:25 GMT

The new WCF Web Programming Model supports REST Design

UriTemplates look interesting...several good links inside that article...

Guidelines for file names which are provided for download

Tue, 22 May 2007 13:03:30 GMT

Many files posted for download have badly chosen file names:

V11.1.0.5_VT_DRIVERS.zip

An example, Vista "Problem Reports and Solutions" just pointed me towards a new network driver from Intel to improve stability. When I follow a link or two and begin downloading the file, the filename is: V11.1.0.5_VT_DRIVERS.zip. When I save that file locally, the file name makes it very tough to understand what the file is.

Shouldn't driver downloads be named with the idea that they will be stored in a directory with other drivers and need to be distinguishable?

Perhaps something more like: IntelPro-Wireless-3945ABG_V11.1.0.5_Drivers.zip

(This isn't saying that Windows shouldn't do a better job of automating this procedure...)

Setup.exe

Similarly, application setup programs shouldn't be named "Setup.exe". Perhaps MyCoolAppName-1.5-Setup.exe.

Guideline

Imagine the lifecycle of the files you provide for download.

What will your users want to do with it? Where will they store it?
If they want to download more than one version (over time), consider putting a version number or date in the filename.
Can you design a file naming scheme that most users will find pretty-good?

Microsoft Url Summit

Sat, 12 May 2007 13:23:12 GMT

I'd like to have an internal get together of at least one person from each team @ Microsoft that impacts how we enable great URLs. What teams should work towards this goal together?

Here is my initial list...who else is important to have in this quest? (where does Microsoft do bad URLs, and how can we help make it easier for you to have great URLs?)

Authoring Tools

Expression Web
Office
Live Writer

Browsers

Web Properties

Live/MSN
- Spaces.Live.com
Microsoft.com
Blogs.Msdn.com

Platforms

IIS
ASP.NET
Sharepoint

Navigating information using good URLs

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:09:36 GMT

URLs, when well designed, provide another navigational choice through information. It is worth investing in design and specifying how applications and web sites use URLs. It should not be an implementation decision left up to a developer or designer at implementation time, as it too often is.

I was please to find as I was composing "Mix07, TechEd, PDC - oh my!" that once I found the Mix URL, it was relatively easy to find the 2 other URLs.

Well kind of...

Mix07 - http://microsoft.com/events/mix
TechEd - http://microsoft.com/events/teched2007
PDC - http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc

Issues:

How do I find the Mix06 site? No idea.
How do I find the Teched06 site? teched2006 redirects to teched2007.
Why is PDC available on MSDN, but not also Microsoft.com?
When I navigate to Mix07 or TechEd's link, why do they show me "/default.mspx" at the end of the URL?
Interesting questions about how event sites should deal with old content, should be findable, etc...

My Take

I'd argue that events/mix, events/teched, events/pdc should all work on microsoft.com.

Perhaps they redirect to the current year events, but they should use the non-year specific url.

events/mix would redirect users to events/mix07
events/teched would redirect users to events/teched07
events/pdc would redirect users to events/pdc07

Old sites would still stay up under the old year specific urls: mix06, teched06, pdc05.

My Url Manifesto

Still have passion for good use of URLs, which is why the URLs here at spaces still pain me (but I'll continue to work with the Spaces team to stress how important it is to fix...).

RobRelyea.com/urlManifesto has some thoughts on the topic and links to most of my blog posts about URLs.

Funny how blogging about a topic can make you influential

A while ago, the PM in charge of URLs for Live sent me a mail to talk about my URL postings...as he was in charge of setting some guidelines. Just by blogging my random thoughts, I think I was able to help influence a part of Microsoft to get better in an area I care about... I should go look for that mail and see where he went with that all...

Url Centric Design

Tue, 02 May 2006 19:19:53 GMT

I believe that websites need to become more focused on Url centric design.

It is not just the UI that matters, Urls matter as well.

I was just trying to send a link to the smarttag sdk to somebody...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/stagsdk/html/stconWelcomeToSTagSDK_HV01074286.asp?frame=true

Ouch.

MSN Spaces is actually worse...I can't control the URL of my post... and there is no indication of what date the post is from or what the topic is (still haven't entered that into the c9 wiki...couldn't log in for some reason).

I have written a bit about Urls before. I link to each blog post on that topic from http://robrelyea.com/UrlManifesto/

Cheesy art to boot: