site text search

[Struan Donald]

* at 09/02 11:08 +0000 Dirk Koopman said:
> On Thu, 2006-02-09 at 10:31 +0000, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
> > Then you've got a broken web site -- period.  Content should have only
> > one, canonical URL.
> 
> <rant>
> 
> Really? So we are only allowed to hyperlink with absolute names now are
> we? Have you googled for stuff on this mailing list recently? 

Aren't all the messages in the archive in one place only?

> The real world really does not work like that. In fact, I would go
> further: any site that implements the "one canonical URL" paradigm is
> likely to be extremely difficult to use. 
> 
> </rant>

I don't think so. Sure, you can have multiple ways to get to that one
URL but it makes perfect sense to me to have the content in one place
on the site. Tim Bray's 'blog[0] is a pretty good example of this in
that he has pages that let you drill down by date and by category but
each entry is in one place only. Heck, the mailman list archive for
this mailing list is an example of that.

I really don't see how it's hard to do this. 

> Of course making sure that only one copy of the content goes into a
> search engine's index is a different problem and is an ideal to be
> striven for. The after effect of actually achieving this would be just
> the one URI to the content from that search engine.

But then why not just have the content in one place in the first
place and then you get round this?

s

[0] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/