[SPTUsers] Rewriting URLs

[Scot Wilcoxon]

On Mon, 2003-03-17 at 15:47, Edward Almasy wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 16, at 02:05:05PM, Scot Wilcoxon wrote:
> > I'm tinkering with my URLs.  At the moment I'm trying to make them
> > shorter and separate the URLs from the underlying technology.  Later I
> > hope to loosen the numerical ID requirement (i.e., a resource for the
> > Library of Congress might have a URL ending in "/LOC" instead of "/834".
>    I may be missing something obvious here -- what're you trying to arrive
>    at as an end result (from the users' perspective)?

>From the users' perspective, their bookmarks should continue to work. 
The names of programs can be changed (Browse.php, Browser.php,
Browse.cgi, Browse, SearchClass, IntegratedSearch, ...) and mod_rewrite
can translate to the current incantation.  If I also support a
non-numeric unique value, such as Title, then bookmarks can also survive
a number of database, conversion, and recovery activities which change a
numerical Id.

Some search engines will also index a site more easily.  I don't know
how much of that affects a user's perspective or a webmaster's
perspective.