URLs as Sentences

I was reading Chris Shiflett’s blog today and found out that Omniti.com just updated their web site, and instituted a really clever approach to URL mappings. Instead of using them to mirror the hierarchical file structure of their applications, they’ve constructed simple, grammatically correct sentences like http://omniti.com/is/hiring.

Given the fact that most enterprise-level web sites are re-writing URL requests and delivering the information to an application on the back-end, there’s little need to reflect any type of file structure in URL addressing any more. It would be interesting to see if this were implemented on a wider basis, whether it might have a broader effect on finding information across the internet.

Most search activity on-line is geared towards filtering based on relevant content. But, addressing a service or commodity in this manner on-line might give users a stronger tool in locating information and products that are relevant to them.

My First Experience with Silverlight

This afternoon I decided to check and see if I could catch a Cubs spring training game on MLB.TV.

Once I navigated to the day’s viewing schedule and clicked to watch the live contest vs. SF. I was surprised that I was given the option to download Microsoft’s Silverlight software so that I could use a media player built with Silverlight. One of the advertised features was that it was Mac compatible.

While MLB.TV has always been mac compatible to some degree, it’s been woefully lacking versus what the windows version felt like.

I was pleasantly surprised by the speed and features available in the player. The line score and box score have been added as widgets next to the video player. Mousing over the video gives you options to resize the video. Overall the speed and responsiveness of the video are strong.

The video itself still appears to be using Microsoft’s WMVcodec. At 400k it’s pixel-y and choppy.

The plug-in installation was relatively painless. I wasn’t prompted to select which browsers will use the plug-in. I simply installed the Silverlight application, then restarted by Flock 1.1 beta and right away it was able to play the silverlight application in Flock.

Yesterday, I downloaded the new Adobe AIR SDK and the trial IDE. In terms of RIA platforms, I’m more interested in Adobe’s AIR at this point, mainly because I’m somewhat familiar with Flex and ActionScript. But Silverlight’s support for JavaScript and Ruby might compel me to give it a try.

In the end, it’s unfortunate that there isn’t a true standards-based platform (coming out of W3C DOM and ECMAScript) that can compete with these proprietary offerings. Adobe’s open source release of the Flex SDK gives them the edge on this front, and for open source developers, it makes AIR a more attractive platform. Of course, Silverlight’s .Net integration makes it much attractive to developers who are wedded to the MS platform.