News item 2010-03-02 - Koos van den Hout

2010-03-02 5 months ago
A ~ in your homepage URL is somewhat very nineties so I started making http://idefix.net/ also point at my homepage and I moved the original content of that page to idefix.net history. I'm now wondering whether I should redirect http://idefix.net/~koos/ to the new location (migrating all links in for example search engines) or let both point at the same page.. or what.
I found some discussions on the tilde in the url. Jukka Korpela has an article Why tilde (~) should not be used in Web addresses (URLs) which explains why this unixism is a bad idea in the modern web and the explanation Get Clues from URLs notes:
Most servers use the ~ symbol to represent the personal directories of individuals.
If the URL contains a tilde then be aware that you are probably (although not definitely) looking at a personal page with personal opinions rather than an official site giving the official line.
Well, as I am the owner of idefix.net there should not be any difference between my opinion and the official opinion of the site.
At work we also got rid of the tildes ages ago so maybe I should just follow the sign of the times. Being good webmasters the old urls still work: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~koos/ will redirect to http://people.cs.uu.nl/koos/.
Enough rambling, this change was to me reason for a bump in the minor version number of the homepage.
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