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Article Excerpt
Last month I wrote about a first step toward building a better web--improving our links. There are many reasons to improve our links, starting with their design. To paraphrase Tim Berners-Lee, "Yes, you have to think about the design of your links." To reference him again, more closely, "Use URIs as names for things, and when people look up your HTTP URIs, provide useful information." (If you missed last month's column, I'm referencing Tim's seminal papers www.w3.org/ DesignIssues/LinkedData.html and www.w 3.org/Provider/Style/URI.)
I tend to think about "design" on the web in terms of two things: graphic/industrial design and human usability. A nice, clean URI that doesn't change, is readable to humans, is amenable to common web behaviors such as bookmarking and proxying, and provides useful information is the basic building block of what we do on the web today. It's a basic building block because it provides useful information when you visit it and because it provides something to link to. Without it, the information that link provides might just as well be printed on a sheet of paper. With the link, you can build a web, and that's what we've been doing for all these years. I'm not too concerned about whether we call trends "Web 2.0" or "Web 3.0" when we're really trying to build a better web, like we have since we were first drawn into it. We're just building a web, just like we have been doing, and just like we will continue to do.
Include Links to Other URIs
Aye, there's the thing. We want our pages to link to other pages, and we want other pages to link to our pages. That's what a web is, after all. Everybody knows that, right? Well, prepare to be shocked. I'm going to let you in on a little secret: We're not doing it very well.
It's true. Follow this scenario in your mind. Maybe it'll sound like a library you know...
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