When I wrote my recent blog entry about long URLs, I expected it would only be of minor interest to a few dedicated web geeks, sort of a historical note from a behind-the-scenes player.

Charles Miller didn’t think so. In an entry titled It’s all your fault!, Charles reports that I have owned up to a “heinous sin”, and says,

Sir, I hereby pronounce you evil, and sentence you to a year with only Jakob Nielsen for company.

Charles is only joking, of course (right Charles? *gulp*).

Over at codestore, Jake thinks I sounded almost guilty about the URLs. I don’t feel guilty in the sense of having done something wrong, but I did have a hand in them, and as Charles makes clear, there are negative feelings out there about them. I work hard on my software, and I care about how people react to it.

Domino URLs really are an API in that you can use them many ways to accomplish similar tasks. For example, the Domino URL Cheat Sheet shows lots of different ways to open documents, including syntaxes that have only names chosen by the developer in them, no baffling and unwieldy hex numbers.

BTW: I like Charles’ blog, and have read it for a while. I especially like his pithy, geeky summary of the blogging process: “tail -f /dev/mind > blog”. I also enjoyed the Lego renditions of Escher works.