[wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

[Marcus Pope]

> I don't know anybody who's said that they're "not possible". However, we do tend to all say that they're a *bad idea*. Which > they are.

Otto, you are just wrong.  You cannot use root relative urls in wordpress multi-site.

> you may not have considered other cases. What happens when your content gets converted into a book, or print? Having 
> the actual full URL, even in the print, would be nice to be able to drive traffic back to your site. Things like that, things you 
> didn't think of for the future, are reasons why not to use relative URLs.

You are certainly presumptuous too, I have considered other medium as well (as has the entire enterprise development community), when you generate a book you prepend the domain to the root relative url in the same way a browser does it, or a proper rss reader does with the channel link element, or the way every search engine does when crawling your site.  This is done once on export of the content, not always from generation.  Unless you do it improperly like print your webpage in the browser which gives you NO LINK URL AT ALL just an underlined series of words - does that mean we should do away with the innerText of anchor elements and only show the fully qualified href?

> The only reason to use relative URLs, in fact, is for migration of content from one domain to another. And realistically, this
> isn't something you should be doing often anyway. 

There are dozens of reasons to use root-relative URLs - here are SOME of them: multiple domain single IP hosting, Multiple country TLDs, accessing content on staging dev & production sites, reverse-proxies, internal v external NAT rules, debugging load-balanced servers by IP address, accessing internal dev environments on an iPhone, following DRY & KISS principles, Not HARD-CODING and wasting hundreds of processing cycles trying to deliver HTTPS urls to the browser when you store them all as HTTP.  Please understand that the technology world is not as narrow as you think it is.  Enterprise web software has been using these techniques for almost two decades now, you are just wrong and a trillion dollar industry does exist out there that proves it.  Why do you think every major legitimate MVC framework uses root-relative URL techniques by default (J2EE, MVC.NET, APS.NET even, Zend, ROR, Django etc)

> And by using root-relative URLs, you limit this case to only migrating
> content at the same level to begin with. Domain changing only, basically. So it's kind of pointless to do.

They do not limit you, have you ever heard of htaccess url rewrites?  That's how you solve that problem if you want to change the structure of your site without changing the content.  Even wordpress has a rewrite api module that could handle this.

> A fully qualified URL works every time, everywhere. It's easily parsed by search engines.
Actually, root-relative URLs work everywhere in theory, it's only in practice where people make poor programming decisions (like feed readers that ignore the channel-link element) that it fails, or import/export systems that fail to include base domains in processing logic.  But root relative URLS are just as easily parsed by search engines, so stop preaching your misinformation.


-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Otto
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 11:44 AM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 8:45 PM, Marcus Pope <Marcus.Pope at springbox.com> wrote:
> Blown away by the dozens of posts from Core WP developers that root 
> relative urls are not possible

I don't know anybody who's said that they're "not possible". However, we do tend to all say that they're a *bad idea*. Which they are.

Using relative-urls, even root relative ones, makes an inherent assumption that your content is only viewed on your website itself, and only in the context of a web browser. This is not necessarily a correct assumption. Furthermore, by making this assumption, you limit the scope of your content unnecessarily.

While I'm sure you probably considered the feed-reader case (where your content is not displayed in the context of your website and so your URLs may not be handled properly by the reader), you may not have considered other cases. What happens when your content gets converted into a book, or print? Having the actual full URL, even in the print, would be nice to be able to drive traffic back to your site. Things like that, things you didn't think of for the future, are reasons why not to use relative URLs.

The only reason to use relative URLs, in fact, is for migration of content from one domain to another. And realistically, this isn't something you should be doing often anyway. And by using root-relative URLs, you limit this case to only migrating content at the same level to begin with. Domain changing only, basically. So it's kind of pointless to do.

A fully qualified URL works every time, everywhere. It's easily parsed by search engines. It works in feed readers. It works no matter where your content is displayed.

You most certainly *can* use relative URLs. You just *shouldn't*.

-Otto
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