[Zope-dev] Zope logic

[Shane Hathaway]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> From: "Wei He" <hewei@mail.ied.ac.cn>
> 
>>An object (say index_html) is inherited by child objects of the site say
>>Document to make http://www.domain.com/Document share the upper
>>level index_html. This sounds good but acutally not I think.
> 
> 
> It not only sounds good, but it is good.No, it' is fantastic. Amazing.
> Totally unbelivingly great! It's one of the best and main features of Zope.

Well, I'm not so enthusiastic about it.  Implicit acquisition in URLs 
leads to subtle bugs.  One thing that just about every Zope site does is 
"acquire" images using a simple relative URL, but that makes the images 
much less cacheable.  If "www.example.com/docs/tutorial/go.gif", 
"www.example.com/docs/go.gif", and "www.example.com/go.gif" refer to the 
same image, HTML authors are likely to just choose any of the three. 
The browser can't know they are the same image and will have to fetch 
the image up to three times.  This problem explodes on larger sites 
unless you educate HTML authors.

Another problem is illustrated by zope.org's version of ZWiki.  I don't 
know if the problem is still there or whether it's in the main ZWiki 
product.  ZWiki uses relative URLs, and some of the URLs displayed on 
the pages include a trailing slash and some don't.  That leads to 
effective URLs that include doubled names.  That's okay until a spider 
requests URLs like this:

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/Proposals/Proposals/FrontPage

Looking at the zope.org logs, I once saw GoogleBot generate URLs like 
this to zope.org of 1000 characters or more.

Shane