Jeni's Musings

If you’ve hung around in linked data circles for any amount of time, you’ll probably have come across the httpRange-14 issue. This was an issue placed before the W3C TAG years and years ago which has become a permathread on semantic web and linked data mailing lists. The basic question (or my interpretation of it) is:

Given that URIs can sometimes be used to name things that aren’t on the web (eg the novel Moby Dick) and sometimes things that are (eg the Wikipedia page about Moby Dick), how can you tell, for a given URI, how it’s being used so that you can work out what a statement (say, about its author) means?

As you may know, I accepted an appointment to the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group earlier this year. Last week was the first face-to-face meeting that I attended, hosted in the Stata Center at MIT. As you can tell from the agenda (which was in fact revised as we went along) it was a packed three days.

What I intend to do here is to briefly report on the major areas that we discussed and give a tiny bit of my own personal take on them. In no way should any of what I write here be judged as revealing the official opinion of the TAG, it’s just me saying what I think, and I’m not going to go into anything in depth because they’re all incredibly gnarly and contentious topics and I’d not only be here all year but also end up in a tar pit.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion recently about the use of hash-bang URIs following their adoption by Gawker, and the ensuing downtime of that site.

Gawker have redesigned their sites, including lifehacker and various others, such that all URIs look like http://{domain}#!{path-to-content} — the #! is the hash-bang. The home page on the domain serves up a static HTML page that pulls in Javascript that interprets the path-to-content and requests that content through AJAX, which it then slots into the page. The sites all suffered an outage when, for whatever reason, the Javascript couldn’t load: without working Javascript you couldn’t actually view any of the content on the site.

This provoked a massive cry of #FAIL (or perhaps that should be #!FAIL) and a lot of puns along the lines of making a hash of a website and it going bang. For analysis and opinions on both sides, see:

• Breaking the Web with hash-bangs by Mike Davies
• Broken Links by Tim Bray
• Hash, Bang, Wallop by Ben Ward
• Hash-bang boom by Tom Gibara
• Thoughts on the Hashbang by Ben Cherry
• Nathan’s comments on www-tag

While all this has been going on, the TAG at the W3C have been drafting a document on Repurposing the Hash Sign for the New Web (originally named Usage Patterns For Client-Side URI parameters in April 2009) which takes a rather wider view than just the hash-bang issue, and on which they are seeking comments.

All matters of design involve weighing different choices against some criteria that you decide on implicitly or explicitly: there is no single right way of doing things on the web. Here, I explore the choices that are available to web developers around hash URIs and discuss how to mitigate the negative aspects of adopting the hash-bang pattern.