[Developers] GUIDs considered harmful

[Will Moffat]

Hi Alec,

Thanks for the update on clean URLs, it sounds very promising.

> 1) The old ?id= syntax is still supported - and it is perfectly legal
> (and probably more common) to have escaped characters in the
> CGI-parameter section of the URL. If forums are barfing on either form
> (?id or not) then their URL parsing is busted, but it's probably less

As Kurt said, the big social-sites are enforcing a new standard for
URLs. They barf on special chars and they're proud of it. Right now
they have more users than us! But even if it's not deliberate, it's
almost inevitable that somebody forgets to encode/decode the URLs as
they get passed around through many different web services, JS
libraries, browser plug-ins, and mark-up languages. So I definitely
think we need clean URLs.


> 2) There is a new '/topic/en' namespace
> http://www.freebase.com/view/topic/en/the_simpsons

Can you confirm that special URL characters are illegal in keys in
'/topic/en' ? That means that IDs in URLs won't have to be escaped at
all. Great!

> 3) In the next 7 days or so, we'll be deploying a new version of the
> software where the "view/" url automatically looks stuff up in
> ...
> MQL requests themselves are going to start returning "/topic/en/the_simpsons"

Very cool. This will make me a happy programmer :-)

> 4) All of that said, this solves the general problem for topics that
> exist in the managed namespace /topic/en, but what about the others?
> ...
> I suspect we'll be able to remove the %23 reasonably soon.

This would be a simple solution to solve my problem. Looking forward
to seeing this happen.

regards,
--Will