Naming is Caring

naming things is something that you do when you care about things. it's a good sign that you care enough when you make the effort to assign names, remember name, manage names, and share those names with others. naming on the web is done using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), and one of the core pillars of Representational State Transfer (REST), the architectural style underlying the web, is that resources should be named, because only then resource representations can be exchanged.

this is an attempt to describe some of the patterns that are used on the web for naming things as simple as a web site's different pages. the analogy being used are children, assuming that (a) everybody can relate to that and (b) in real life, they are usually named, and most people can probably agree that that's a good idea.

• frame-based sites (one URI for the entire site): your children are unnamed and you refer to them by the place at which their rooms are located inside the house: you know, the one living in the second room from the right on the top floor.
• Flash-based sites: no names as well, but instead of referring to them spatially, all of them wear really bright clothes and move constantly and even more energetic once you get close to them: i am talking about the one with the bright yellow blinking hat that vigorously spins out of the room whenever you touch it.
• Silverlight-based sites: basically the same as for the Flash children, but the visual effects of the children are a little more civilized, and they are dressed by a major national clothing outfit: the one with the elegant reddish outfit we bought at the mall, that subtly fades out of the room when you come near it.
• URIs like http://.../site.asp?page=42 with unstable URIs: you number your children according to the order in which they got up this morning. tomorrow all of them will have different numbers: i am talking of child #5 as of today, no idea what that one had as a number yesterday.
• URIs like http://.../site.asp?page=42 with stable URIs: children are numbered in the sequence in which they were born, so you have child #1, #2, #3, and so forth. child #3 brought home a dead squirrel today, #2 did not really like that.
• properly named pages: you actually care enough to give your children names. no need for an example here...

i am not sure that i covered all the ways in which people are discovering new ways to build web sites violating basic web design principles. if there is one that i have missed, please let me know.

Comments

[William Vambenepe]

And then you have the links that don't have an associated URL but instead call a piece of Javascript that launches a new window (with no scroll bar and no navigation bar). Such that it's cumbersome for someone to make out the actual URL of the new page.
In your child-rearing analogy, maybe it's equivalent to dressing all your kids same way and giving them the same mask to wear so they are as hard as possible to distinguish and name individually.