Last modified: 2012-04-16 09:15:38 UTC
Some suggestions for shorter and simpler URLs: 1. Make the "wiki" path prefix optional... OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page 2. Merge the "api.php" and "index.php" scripts... OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=sitematrix NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org?action=sitematrix 3. Make the "title" and "titles" parameters optional... OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=render&title=Main_Page NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page?action=render OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=info&titles=Main_Page NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page?action=query&format=json&prop=info 4. Use the page identifier in a URL shortening service... OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org?15580374
Do you realise how much confusion and pain that would cause trying to implement it?
To elaborate... (In reply to comment #0) > Some suggestions for shorter and simpler URLs: > > 1. Make the "wiki" path prefix optional... > > OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page > NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page MediaWiki supports this, however we officially don't recommend this for multiple reasons, would be stupid if we violated our own best practices. > 2. Merge the "api.php" and "index.php" scripts... > > OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=sitematrix > NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org?action=sitematrix No wai, mixing API actions with index.php actions would be unmaintainable and backwards-incompatible mess. > 3. Make the "title" and "titles" parameters optional... > > OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=render&title=Main_Page > NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page?action=render Being currently worked on. > OLD: > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=info&titles=Main_Page > NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page?action=query&format=json&prop=info See 2) > 4. Use the page identifier in a URL shortening service... > > OLD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page > NEW: http://en.wikipedia.org?15580374 Looks rather misleading. This approach has several deficiencies, one of them is that page IDs are not preserved after deleletion/undeletion. Anyway, I think there is a bug about permalinks somewhere. Please don't create single bug with multiple issues, it makes searching hard.
