In other words, I decipher the web site??™s URL
language. At the beginning of the chapter, I already made an argument for the usefulness of
having URLs that give you direct access to a resource. Before analyzing Flickr, Google Maps,
Amazon, and del.icio.us for their URL languages, I??™ll make some general comments about URL
languages. Each web site has its own URL language, but URL languages vary in terms of addressability,
granularity, transparency, and persistence.4
Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby present a helpful definition of addressability: ???Addressability
means that every interesting aspect of your service is immediately accessible from
outside. Every interesting aspect of your service has a URI: a unique identifier in a format
that??™s familiar to every computer-literate person.... Addressability makes it possible for others
to make mashups of your service: to use it in ways you never imagined.???
Some URL languages are highly expressive, making resources and their associated data
addressable at high granularity. Others expose relatively little of the functionality of the web
site or only at a very course-grained level. Some URL languages are relatively transparent; their
meaning and context are easily apparent to those who did not design the site. Other URL languages
tend to the opaque, making it difficult or impossible to refer to web site??™s functionality
in any detail.
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