[thesite] test.evolt - urls to articles

Joshua OIson joshua at alphashop.net
Fri Nov 24 09:30:54 CST 2000


One more quick comment about not ending the urls in something predictable,
such as "index.cfm", giving a url such as
www.evolt.org/articles/i_am_still_asleep.cfm

When parsing the urls as evolt is doing, it *would* be nice to end with the
article_name.cfm, but parsing such an animal is heneious  (sp?) if you are
ALSO trying to deal with the issue where the user fails to put any filename
on the end of the url, such as www.evolt.org/articles/go_back_to_bed or
www.evolt.org/articles/go_back_to_bed/

When parsing those, you'd really not be able to determing easily and
reliably what the last parameter to the url is.  In the case of articles, it
may be easy, but imagine a larger app such as ecommerce where you may have
stacked categories and subcategories.  The urls

www.evolt.org/store/shoes/nike/index.cfm

and

www.evolt.org/store/shoes/nike/court_shoes

obviously the intended targets are the main page for Nike products section
and Nike's court shoes.  But, if you allowed the flexibility of allowing the
last paramenter in the file name, you'd really not know wether to discard or
use the last url parameter in the selection of the category.

Does Nike really sell shoes in the "index" category?  I don't know.  But,
for maximum user friendliness, it's difficult (though possible with some
seriously cludgy "assumptions") to allow for that url format.

Hopefully that makes sense.

-joshua





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