cgi-bin, .html, .pl etc in URIs

[Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh@earth.li>]

Hi,

I'd like to draw the list's attention to Tim Berners-Lee's article "Cool 
URIs don't change": http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI (which I'm sure 
many people will already have read).

In particular, this article argues against the use of 
implementation-related artifacts appearing in URIs, such as /cgi-bin/, 
.html, .pl, .php etc. These are all things that only occur because 
something is dynamic rather than static, or currently implemented using 
one particular language. A change in implementation should not lead to a 
change in interface (i.e. the URI).

With this in mind, it would be nice if the webapps policy also pushed 
applications in the direction of conforming with this principle (one major 
step would be not to default to http://server/cgi-bin/... for scripts), or 
at the very least made it easy for packages that want to conform with it 
to do so. Working out a good mechanism for setting up Apache aliases to do 
the right thing (perhaps using an appropriate dh_ or install-time script) 
would be one way to do this.

Cheers,

Ganesh