[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> (1) The above URLs (I believe) are expressing the same thing - they
> are identifying the same resource. So which is "better"?
For practical purposes, the first is better, since there is no limit to
the number of name components. In the second example, you can have at
most 2 or 3 parameters before search engines give up and stop indexing
your resource.
In theory, in the first case the semantics of each level of the
hierarchy are implicit but you have the advantage of an additional
semantic axis (taxonomic relationship), whereas in the second this axis
is absent but the names of the semantic roles of each component are
explicit. Also, in the first case we can make the fact that the
resource represents a collection of other resources explicit
(http://www.location.org/US/MA/), whereas in the second case there is
no way to know whether it represents one resource or many just from its
form.
> (2) As was noted at the top, the purpose of a URL is to "identify" a
> resource. Can every resource in the universe be identified using the
> above two approaches?
Of course. In fact, you don't need more than one name component to
identify every resource in the universe, although this can lead to some
pretty unwieldy names.
> Are there resources that do not lend themselves to identification
> using the above two approaches?
If there is a resource that doesn't fit into any kind of taxonomy, then
presumably the first is not the best kind of representation for it,
unless we assume that the "root" level contains names of objects of
this kind.
If there is a resource that cannot be differentiated from other
resources on the basis of explicit properties, then the second form is
useless. However, normally when this happens people just use a vacuous
property name like "name" or "id" or "num", and assign the resource a
taxonomic name or serial number.
--
Chris Burdess
|
