Truly Opaque URLs

>
> Well, I suspect you are like me:  what my old boss called a "tweaker",
> i.e. someone who is always tweaking something trying to make every
> aspect perfect.  This is something one has to learn to control because
> the fact is, when you're in tweaking mode you are almost certainly
> working on something no one else in the world notices or cares about.
>
> In my case, I looked at how to get rid of those ugly strings, but I know
> it doesn't matter so I limited my time to 5 minutes. I can click the
> "use cookies" button and it works fine, if not ok.  What is important to
> me is having bookmarkable URLs, but Seaside provides an effective way to
> do that.
>
> I've never heard of one single person going "ew!  Look at those URL's,
> I'm never looking at this site again!".  And I don't mean that to
> belittle your comments in any way, just try to help put them in
> perspective. :)

> Jason Johnson wrote:
>> Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> Well, I suspect you are like me:  what my old boss called a  
>> "tweaker",
>> i.e. someone who is always tweaking something trying to make every
>> aspect perfect.  This is something one has to learn to control  
>> because
>> the fact is, when you're in tweaking mode you are almost certainly
>> working on something no one else in the world notices or cares about.
>>
>> In my case, I looked at how to get rid of those ugly strings, but I  
>> know
>> it doesn't matter so I limited my time to 5 minutes. I can click the
>> "use cookies" button and it works fine, if not ok.  What is  
>> important to
>> me is having bookmarkable URLs, but Seaside provides an effective  
>> way to
>> do that.
>>
>> I've never heard of one single person going "ew!  Look at those  
>> URL's,
>> I'm never looking at this site again!".  And I don't mean that to
>> belittle your comments in any way, just try to help put them in
>> perspective. :)
>
> Tweaker, well, hmmm....., yes! :)
>
> But I also like things to be beautiful when able. I was just wanting  
> to
> find out if such would be a readily available, low lying fruit, easy
> win. Apparently not.
>
> Bookmarkable URLs are important to me. And as you say, Seaside does
> provide a way to do such.
>
> Despite my preference for nice looking URLs. I have not gone running  
> to
> some other framework to do web development. I have yet to see anything
> as beautiful to work with or as productive.
>
> Seaside is far, far, far from being the worst offender in ugly URLs.  
> It
> probable wouldn't make the top 100. :)
>
> There are few frameworks which do them better, and many which do them
> much worse.
>
> So since there wasn't an easy win. I am going about learning and
> hopefully mastering Seaside. This isn't a large community but I do
> believe it to be a very good one. Response time is often very rapid.  
> We
> just need a few more experts scattered around the globe so that  
> there is
> most often an available expert. Even so, it is still pretty well  
> covered.
>
> Currently Seaside is as good as I've found.
>
> I have a hard time getting excited about anything not Smalltalk.  
> Love my
> Squeak. Spend enough time in Seaside and Smalltalk, it is very  
> possible
> to understand a much higher amount of the framework, toolkit, etc.  
> than
> in anything else I've found. Why more people can't see it, I don't  
> know.
> Its baffling. :)
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jimmie
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> I think in this discussion we should distinguish between closed
> applications and public web sites (or applications that are part of a
> web site). In the former case I don't care at all about the URLs, and
> only care about bookmarking in very specific situations because it
> usually does not make sense.
>
> On the other hand, on a public web site it matters. It matters for
> example for search engines. If each link looks differently although it
> points to the same page, this is not good. Also, you don't want that the
> session key of the bot shows up in search results. You want to make
> important keywords be part of the URL, you want URLs to be short so that
> people can easily mail them around (and no, I don't buy the argument
> that also Amazon has unfriendly URLs).
>
> Out of the box Seaside is not very good at such things, but then,
> Seaside is for building web applications, not web sites.
> However, in case you happen to use Seaside for web sites (as we do for
> www.cmsbox.com for example) it is not too hard to tweak it.

> As far as I understand the problem, for each component you could ask
> yourself:
>
>   Would I ever want to come back to *this* component in *this* state
>   as the result of a bookmark rather than a particular session?
>
> If the answer is "Yes", then the next step is for the component to add
> URL-based state information to the URL with
>   #extraPath: or #updateUrl:,
> and then recognize those state items with #initialRequest:.
>
> Perhaps a good demo of this would be handy.  Maybe I can come up with
> something, but Smarter People than Me might do it even faster and post
> it to one of their blogs (nudge nudge).