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 <gerald@hwg.org>
To: hwg-mgmt@hwg.org
Subject: abbreviated URLs: cool feature or silly idea?
Message-Id: <Pine.SGI.3.96.980115032216.26010U-100000@world.std.com>

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   <gerald@hwg.org>
(GB) Member, The HTML Writers Guild
System Administrator, hwg.org
http://www.hwg.org/