Effort invested in the design of a URL namespace (Universal Republic of Love!) pays back many times over. Users get to bookmark, email, and otherwise make use of rich URLs. Developers can do the kind of lightweight integration I’ve been harping on for months. But there’s more: developers can also learn a lot about how users behave. “If more people spent an hour or two staring at apache access_log files in action,” Tim wrote to me, “more people would understand the Web a lot better.”
When you organize your URL namespaces for the convenience of users and developers, you are also instrumenting your software to be analyzed in action. Think about the kinds of stories you’d like your access log to be able to tell, and plan accordingly!
thanks to Jon Udell
This is a corollary of an idea I have expressed as “never put anything into a database until you understand how you plan to get it out.” or perhaps more plainly expressed as, let your reports drive your database structure and query design. Applied to a website, this makes a lot of sense as well, in terms of how you name and organize your content.