Know your stuff: (Was: [uf-discuss] hCard-o-matic toplevel div notaddress?)

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 10/17/06 1:51 AM, "Mike Schinkel" <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the reorganization to create mini-home pages for each microformat
> will make it easy to find and remember those

I think this is a good suggestion and perhaps we can do with a naming
convention for such "mini-home" overview pages, like *-index, e.g.
hcard-index.

> i.e
> 
> http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard/faq

Mike, do you see any advantage to using a "/" instead of a "-" ?

The current page is at:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-faq

When we established this convention of using "-" separated words, we did so
for a few reasons. 

1. Findability.  It is significantly better for ambient findability.  Search
engines will index "hcard-faq" both as a phrase and as separate words.  This
is in stark comparison with both "hcard_faq" (which search engines will only
index as a phrase), and the wiki-traditional initialism "HcardFaq" which is
also only indexed as a phrase.

2. Readability/usability.  Use of hyphens to denote compound phrases/words
is common in English, whereas "_" is programmer convention, and "/"
typically means "and/or" or "divided by" rather than a phrase when used to
separate words.

3. Avoiding hierarchy.  Hierarchical structures/taxonomies tend to be more
limiting (and confusing) for most folks, in comparison to flat
sets/taxonomies.  Thus we have avoided (with only *two* exceptions), the use
of any hierarchy ("/") in wiki page URLs.  The two exceptions are static
uses, that is two *specific* sub-directories inside which the contents
remain flat: /wiki/rest/ and /wiki/events/ .  /rest/ is essentially for a
whole separate space of wiki pages having to do with a very different topic.
/events/ acts purely as a container for event specific pages.  I for one
would like to avoid any additional sub-directories.

Thanks,

Tantek