Not all penguins use cool URIs
By glazou on Monday 26 February 2007, 05:54 - General - Permalink
My children offered me as birthday present the french translation of Terry Jones' "War on the War on Terror". Good book. Could have been much better and have more impact with more cynical humour like Pierre Desproges'. The first pages of the book contain an introductory chapter written by the two translators and that section has a three-lines footnote I'll try to copy here below :
1. Propos reproduits sur le site de l'éditeur Penguin Books :
(http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,0_10000069
76,00.html).
And I found it amazing.... First, since this part of Penguin Books' web page is about Terry Jones and his books, the URL should probably be :
http://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/TerryJones/0,,0_1000006976,00.html
I checked the "www" is totally useless here :
http://penguin.co.uk/authors/TerryJones/0,,0_1000006976,00.html
The web page is only about Terry Jones, and his bio. From that page, there is one link to an interview and all other links are unrelated to Terry Jones. So why the hell do we need a filename here ? In that case the URL becomes :
http://penguin.co.uk/authors/TerryJones
Oh, wait, hey, that URL is now short enough to be printed on a single line of the original footnote, it's intuitive enough you can infer what the URL for another penguin author is just knowing his/her name, it's easy to remember, and it would probably simplify drastically the administration and maintainance of Penguin's web server...
Naaaaah, that's tooooo simple, Penguin could not do that, could they ?