Web Namespace Design

By Jon Udell

July 9, 2000

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As I was writing last week's column, I checked my homepage for a reference to an earlier column, but the link was broken. Say what? I soon found, as some of you have also found, that a planned migration of Byte.com (from TechWeb's content management system to Dr. Dobb's CMS) had altered the former namespace. So for example, the column in question, which has been known to the world as http://www.byte.com/column/threads/BYT20010608S0001, had become http://www.byte.com/documents/BYT20010608S0001/. (The trailing backslash in the new namespace is required, by the way, in order to expand the shorter URL to its "real" form: http://www.byte.com/documents/s=705/BYT20010608S0001/index.htm.) The new namespace is internally self-consistent, but extant URLs don't know about it.

Given that much of my written portfolio for the last few years is represented by Byte.com URLs, which are in wide circulation — stored on web pages, in search engine indexes, in bookmark files — this was discouraging news. But, I thought, let's just roll up our sleeves and fix it. After all, the old and new namespaces appeared to be algorithmically related. The protean Apache module mod_rewrite, created by the redoubtable Ralf Engelschall, is solely dedicated to solving these kinds of namespace maintenance problems. Perhaps, the solution could be as simple as:

RewriteRule ^(/column/threads)/(.+)$  /documents/$1/ [PT]

Well, it wasn't. I'll explain why not, but first, some history.

A Brief History of Byte.com

Byte.com began in the spring of 1995, as the research project that motivated my monthly Web Project column. The vast majority of its pages were HTML-ized Byte articles. We converted those articles into a simple tagged format (this was several years before XML appeared on the radar), and then I wrote the code to convert that format into two electronic publications: the BYTE CD-ROM, and the Byte.c

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