Kdrive tree/status

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 19:06:49 +0100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> It should be noted that rewrite is an absolute sledgehammer, and while I
> loved tooling around with it to do absolutely insane stuff, it's an
> absolute resource hog, and trying to con it into mixing static and
> shared namespaces is nasty.

I won't argue that the rewrite stuff I had before was the best tool for
the job. But I certainly don't regret having done it. Once a URL is
published it should live forever, and leaking implementation into that
URL makes that really hard. Hiding the implementation actually makes it
*easier* to change the tools without breaking the web site.

> Personally, I think the main fd.o site should be static (well, generated
> from WML or something, in a shared repository), but that would kind of
> require a web team who are good at this sort of thing -- volunteers?

That sounds quite reasonable. And it's exactly the ability to make a
change like this that makes me want to eliminate all the "/wiki"
implementation details.

There's a similar issue with mail archives, where again, persistent URLs
are important. Even the archives themselves often end up with links to
previously archived messages. And the recent efforts to switch from
pipermail to mhonarc again point out the benefits of not leaking the
implementation out.

But Tim Berners-Lee said it all better than me long before:

	Cool URIs don't change
	http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

-Carl