From gerald@omicron.pair.com Thu Jan 15 03:37:14 1998 Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 03:37:00 -0500 (EST) From: Gerald Oskoboiny To: hwg-mgmt@hwg.org Subject: abbreviated URLs: cool feature or silly idea? Message-Id: I added something to www.hwg.org to allow "abbreviated URLs", so now you can type (e.g.): /l/arch to get /lists/archives.html /s/j/r to get /services/jc/rfp/ /o/h/g to get /opcenter/hwginc/gb.html /r/f to get /resources/faqs/ /r/h to get /resources/html/ It's kind of dumb so far: if a number of things match (e.g., /l/a ), it just redirects you to the first one that matches, which isn't always the one you were looking for. This may have some side-effects in that if someone tries to get e.g. /lists/archives by typing /l/a, they get redirected to /lists/analysis.html, which I'm not sure is meant to be a public document -- Tammy? This means that URLs which previously had a status of "secure through obscurity" (i.e., nobody knew about them because the URLs weren't advertised) suddenly becoming discovered because someone gets redirected there when looking for something with a similar abbreviation. But security through obscurity is really a bad policy for a Web site anyway, so if people think this will be a problem, we should do something about the s-t-o problem, by arranging for stuff that isn't meant to be seen by everyone to be put in password-protected directories if it isn't already. Aside from the s-t-o thing, can anyone think of reasons why we wouldn't want a feature like this on the site? (I think it's really cool, myself! It was inspired by Apache's mod_speling module, which W3C uses to provide case-insensitive URLs.) Of course, we don't want to start *linking* to these abbreviated URLs, which is why I made it do a redirect instead of serving the page with the abbreviated URL. The redirects are just there for typing convenience. Thoughts? Gerald -- Gerald Oskoboiny (GB) Member, The HTML Writers Guild System Administrator, hwg.org http://www.hwg.org/