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Michael Boyle's weblog

Unreadable URLs are bad

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Scott Rosenberg takes up the case in his post, Terror of tinyurl.

From the earliest days of the Web to the present, there’s been a fundamental split between people who get the value of “human-readable URLs” and people who don’t.[…]
Today, though, we’re taking a step backwards, or at least sideways, in the cause of human readability, thanks to the growing popularity of the “tinyurl.”

I have had this discussion (arguing for human-readable URLs) with well-intentioned but clueless developers so many times it borders on the absurd. In fact, Nadia and I were just discussing it last night! Like Rosenberg, I understand why it’s important in the twitterverse, but outside of that relatively limited context, tinyurl is a user-hostile pain in the backside.

It’s International Women’s Day

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It’s International Women’s Day

today. I’m not big on setting aside a single day to recognize the worth and importance of fully 51% of humanity, but nonetheless, happy day! Nadia has written an interesting article on this subject today, based on her thoughts and the responses to an email that she sent out earlier in the week.

I was lucky – my mother is and was a feminist, a business-owner, and an all around great role-model both for me and about the role that women can play in society. That kind of upbringing is fundamental to who I am today. In my life, the event which most clearly marked my development on the relationship between men and women in society was December 6, for sure. By then I was already clearly pro-feminist, but the terrible events of that day (which I remember here annually) served to change the place that these ideas had in my life. From that day on, the idea that women were to be respected as equals in every way was not simply a background thought but an up-front concern. It went from background feeling to an everyday commitment.

Many people

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Many people

have weighed in on the question of CSS now that the issue has become a “live” one in the weblog world. A representative opinion on one “side” of the thing (if sides here makes sense, which I don’t actually think it does) is that of Matt Bridges in CounterProductive. He wrote, “When a designer uses CSS to mimic what can be done with tables, separating content into different boxes that are placed at specific parts of the screen, they tie that content to that layout. This completely defeats the purpose of separation of style from content.”

It’s a perfectly reasonable statement, and having worked on some CSS layouts I do see the drawbacks alongside the advantages. The problem is, however, that most people seem to have the foundational principles wrong. And their error leads in ugly directions.

CSS is about style. But there’s something much more important than that. Implementing CSS also returns structure to HTML. And that is where the value is – it’s not about separating content from style – that’s what a CMS is for. Rather, it’s to return the third variable – structure – to its rightful place in the mix. So that not only do you have the flexibility to do anything you want with the content (in the CMS), and to redesign that site as you like, but there’s also a fully degradeable version at the heart of the human-readable, “published” version that any device can read, as long as it can interpret HTML in some rudimentary way.

Michael Boyle Blog