A fellow URL fetishest!
I love me a well-designed URL scheme—here’s four interesting approaches.
URLs are consumed by machines, but they should be designed for humans. If your URL thinking stops at “uniquely identifies a page” and “good for SEO”, you’re missing out.
Matthias Beitl takes a stab at trying to tackle the tricky UI problem of exposing the URLs of Progressive Web Apps. This stuff is hard.
In this English language alternative to latitude and longitude coordinates, the Clearleft office is located at:
cross.rooms.quick
A fascinating ten-year old essay looking at the early days of the web and how it conquered FTP and Gopher.
And though glitz, politics, hard work, and competitors’ mistakes all played a role in the success of the web, there are also aspects of the architecture that ensured the web would catch on. I think the web won because of the URI.
URIs are everywhere, and what’s vaguely funny now is the idea that they’re something special. But they’re very special: URI management is the fundamental consideration behind the design of web sites, web applications, and web services. Tim Berners-Lee originally intended URIs to be invisible, but they’re too useful for that.
Tantek shares a fascinating history lesson from Tim Berners-Lee on how the IETF had him change his original nomenclature of UDI—Universal Document Identifier—to what we now use today: URL—Uniform Resource Locator.
Right now, this move to remove URLs from the interface of Chrome is just an experiment …but the fact that Google are even experimenting with it is very disturbing.
“Who? Me? No, I was never going to actually blow the web’s brains out—I just wanted to feel the heft of the weapon as I stroked it against the face of the web.”
This a great proposal: well-researched and explained, it tackles the tricky subject of balancing security and access to native APIs.
Far too many ideas around installable websites focus on imitating native behaviour in a cargo-cult kind of way, whereas this acknowledges addressability (with URLs) as a killer feature of the web …a beautiful baby that we definitely don’t want to throw out with the bathwater.
I had a lovely conversation at the Update after-party with Georgie about the infographic dress she was wearing. It’s quite lovely.
A cute little Mac app that exports your address book contacts in multiple formats ...including an HTML file with hCards!
An excellent rant by Jeff Atwood that explains just why the password anti-pattern is such an abhorrent practice: "How did we end up in a world where it's even remotely acceptable to ask for someone's email credentials?"
You can know use an API (with BBAuth) to get contact Yahoo account contact details. There really is no excuse now for still using the password anti-pattern.
Yours to cut out and keep.
Chris mocks up an interface idea for Apple.