Re: [Directory-discuss] stable urls

[Jim Meyering]

Joshua Gay wrote:

>> So, at a minimum, http://directory-dev.fsf.org/project/emacs
>> and http://directory-dev.fsf.org/project/emacs/
>> should redirect to http://directory-dev.fsf.org/wiki/emacs.
>> That should be a simple rewrite rule.
>
> We have these rewrite rules in place for when <directory-dev.fsf.org>
> becomes <directory.fsf.org>. We will also have redirects set-up for all
> of the old category (and subcategory) pages. So,
> <http://directory.fsf.org/category/aud/> ->
> <http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/category/audio/> and
> <http://directory.fsf.org/category/mp3/> ->
> <http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Audio/mp3/>.
>
>
>> Not 100% critical, but still very helpful, would be to allow a trailing
>> /, so that http://directory-dev.fsf.org/wiki/emacs/ works as well as
>> ../emacs without the /.  That should also be easily doable with
>> mod_rewrite.
>
> I believe that trailing slash is set to work for all project pages ... I
> will need to see if I can get this added to the category pages.
>
>>
>> IMHO Ideal, but harder to achieve as far as I can imagine, would be to
>> not change the urls at all, so that
>> http://directory-dev.fsf.org/project/emacs/ remains the visible url,
>> instead of introducing this new /wiki level.
>
> I don't think we want to do this, anyhow. We will want to make sure that
> search engines update their URLs over time, so we'll want to do a real
> redirect if possible.

Hi Joshua,

It would be nice to aim for shorter, not longer links.
The prefix of "http://directory.fsf.org/"; is already rather long.
If you must add the 5 more bytes of "wiki/" to each canonical
package link, then how about a cname/redirect short-cut like e.g.,

    http://dir.fsf.org/p/package_name/

>> And: orthogonal to this, but very important IMHO, is the automatic
>> upcasing that now happens: .../wiki/emacs -> .../wiki/Emacs.  How would
>> you feel about not doing this?  I see it as a big step backwards.

I agree wholeheartedly.
The name of a package is case-sensitive,
and the canonical web link should respect that.
Don't let the tools dictate the user interface.