By Janus Boye
In a refreshing blog entry from last week, Microsoft evangelist Jon Udell considered .aspx harmful. Udell boils it down to futureproofing and style.
We've been writing about the importance of URL's since 2005 (e.g. Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value?, State of the Art for Enterprise Portals) and in The Web CMS Report and The Enterprise Portals Report we cover the URL structure for each and every vendor.
Interestingly almost every vendor criticizes what we write about them when it comes to URL conventions, with a few open source vendors as the exception. Either the vendors with harmful URLs assert that it is a non-issue or they keep repeating that their professional services team can easily implement redirects or rewrites or other hacks to create shorter, better URLs. Rarely do they remember that if you do create redirects those too also need to managed.
With lack of understanding from the vendors, many enterprises find themselves tied to both vendors and technology. An unfortunate example is Italian car manufacturer FIAT, which uses BroadVision on their website with a URL that looks like this:
http://www.fiat.com/cgi-bin/pbrand.dll/FIAT_COM/home.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=no
The URL is fascinating reading: You'll find the BroadVision cookie flag at the end, after JSP technology mixed with a DLL and CGI (!) earlier on. I've seen longer URLs, but the problem here is certainly both futureproofing and style, as Udell points out. I would add security to the list of problems, since a transparently programmatic URL is easier to hack.
Not only should you ensure that your site has short, meaningful and permanent URLs, but as buyers you should also try to influence the vendors so that they understand the issue. This matter is relevant to every single project, so customization should not be required. This should be out-of-the-box!
Further reading: Take a look at a 10-year old article from Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee: Cool URIs don't change.
