[dokuwiki] Re: Patch attached: Optionally add a filetype to wikipage urls, e.g. .html to look like static html

At 13:20 +0100 UTC, on 2009-02-24, Helmut Tischer wrote:

[...]

> Sander wrote:
>  > To be nice to wary users.
>
> That's my point. So let's leave the technology now:
>
> Content Authors care about attracting readers, even if the readers are
> not technically educated. That's what made the "http" to something
> what everyone wants to use - and they even keep on calling it "www" !

Well, with "wary" I didn't necessarily mean "uneducated". (I'm quite wary
myself, but I don't consider myself uneducated when it comes to the Web.) But
I do get your point (up to a point) and agree of course with the idea of
trying to make things no more complicated than necessary for end users.

I'm just not convinced about the solution. In part because I don't think that
users are truly helped by making them 'feel' that ".html" has any meaning on
the Web. For some more arguments, see
<http://webrepair.org/strategy/certification/requirements#req52> and the W3C
Note it refers to: <http://www.w3.org/TR/chips/>. Also see TBL's unoffocial
"Cool URIs don't change", at <http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI>. If this
is too much to read, consider the case where at some point an author changes
a document from one format to another. What today is a HTML document, might
tomorrow be a PDF, for instance. The content hasn't changed. Just the file
format. If you were relying on a URL with a trailing ".html", it is now dead.
If your URL were more generic, it would happily keep on working.

For hyperlinks, in a Web context, a better solution would be something along
these lines: <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/WWW/userfriendlierhyperlinks/>
(which Dokuwiki basically already does).

You are talking about a slightly different context though -- the situation
where URLs are not hyperlinks but just text, like links in (plain text) email.

So here's a thought: how about using content-negotiation for this?
If, when requesting <http://www.dokuwiki.org/syntax.html>, the server would
know to return the resource at <http://www.dokuwiki.org/syntax>, then one
could add a trailing ".html" to links in plain text contexts, thus providing
a hint that the URL points to a HTML document.

This way nothing would (need to) be changed about Dokuwiki's URLs. It would
merely allow someone to type an extra ".html" and, assuming the resource
actually is a Web page, still get the intended document. If at some point the
author changes the resource to some other format, Dokuwiki should probably
return a 404. In that sense this does go against
<http://www.w3.org/TR/chips/> and <http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI>. But
only in the sense of what sort of requests it accepts -- not in the sense of
the URLs it actually generates itself. I'm inclined to consider this
acceptable.

It might seem to conflict with the general wiki concept of "requesting a
non-existant page == creating a new page", but I believe Dokuwiki already
provides the option to return a 404 in such situations, and in fact already
does "pretty URLs", so I suppose this wouldn't be that much of a stretch.

[...]

> One further note:
> For media files even DokuWiki uses the file extension to produce the
> correct mime header

Sure, but that's a *local* context. The reason that such headers are
generated in the first place is because the file name extension has no
meaning on the Internet.

>, and DokuWiki behaves surprising (not for Dokuwiki
> experts of course), if one mixes up
> example.com/namespace/namespaceorfile with example.com/namespaceorfile/

I'm not sure which surprise you are referring to here.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
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