From: Thomas Hurst Date: 2002-02-14T08:57:36+09:00 Subject: Re: IOWA troubles (was Re: choice of HTML templating system) * Julian Fitzell (julian@beta4.com) wrote: > Thomas Hurst wrote: > > Can it use cookies instead? I can't stand ugly URI's. > > Well, I also hate long ugly URI's and iowa certainly could be modified > to store the session number in a cookie. The problem is that the rest > of the URL is made up of data telling iowa what page to load, what > action to do, etc... Well, the thing is, what's the point in serving content if the one way of specifying it's location is a meaningless jumble of characters? > While some of this could probably be submitted as POST data instead, > the problem is that if the URI doesn't change then your browser thinks > you're going to the same page again. And if this happens you can no > longer use the back button - as far as the browser's concerned you > just keep refreshing the same page and the data changes each time. Well, concider I want to serve fairly static content; collections of articles etc, with navigation elements built up from metadata from some backend that may do fancy things like versioning, or whatever; a URI schema for a one-time-object-instance you can only recreate by going though a set of links from the start of the site each time isn't very optimal for that sort of layout. Even things like weblogs are better off having URI's like /article/yyyy/mm/dd/id or so. Sorry, I haven't looked hard enough at iowa to work out how things like this work in it - can URI schemas like that be supported using it? > So while you could shorten the URI a little it still needs to contain > some numbers to make things work smoothly. What about if you're just serving content and don't need to worry about state (much)? Bog standard URI schemes which contain a path to a resource are really all I want, and even if I did need to track state, I still feel the URI should reflect the resource and not some meaningless internal bit of data, especially when it may result in potential security problems with session hijacking etc. > If you really cared about the URI's you could probably have a frameset > with just one frame or something and put the iowa page in the frame. > Then browsers wouldn't show the URI changing, they just show the URI > of the frameset - I think. Sorry, I'm afraid you're going to burn in the fiery pits of hell for all eternity for suggesting something 10x worse than messy URI's ;) -- Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst - freaky@aagh.net - http://www.aagh.net/ - "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."