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Carl Camera

Attacking URL Cruft

I think one of the things I want to do before releasing a v1 of Vine Type is to attack the cruft in URLs. Cruft, for Vine Type, are all of the %20s that appear in the address bar when spaces exist in section names.

Advantages of cruft reduction are

  • more readable
  • easier to type in
  • more useable
  • friendlier to search engine bots.

The standard behavior for other CMS applications is to replace spaces with the underscore character.
For example, rather than this:

section=our%20services/landscaping%20and%20lighting

accept and generate this:

section=our_services/landscaping_and_lighting

That seems pretty straightforward, but I have dozens of pages already created on the Vine Type site that have underscores in them. Vine Type isn't even out of Beta status and I'm dealing with legacy issues!

I don't think the URLs will be cruft-free because they will still contain the default.aspx and querystring ?section= stuff. There are ways to configure IIS to deal with some of these issues but I want to keep the installation as simple as possible with minimal impact to the OS and IIS setup.

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