TQR — a little bit of Denton’s How to Make a Faceted Classification (and Put It on the Web)

This morning’s dur­ing the slog up tread­mill hill I read through Wm. Denton’s How to Make a Faceted Clas­si­fi­ca­tion and Put It on the Web.

I’ll have a lot more to say about it in a cou­ple of days. (Beware.)

This morn­ing I only want to point you to the sec­tion 4.2: Faceted Nav­i­ga­tion: Three Ques­tions and Four Prin­ci­ples. I love his fourth principle:

The URL is the nota­tion for the clas­si­fi­ca­tion. It should be com­pact, comprehensible,and editable. When a knowl­edge­able user exam­ines it he or she should be able to under­stand how it is built and how edit­ing it could lead to other entities.

Tech­ni­cally this can be a royal pain in the ass to cre­ate and many will argue that it is only use­ful for the uber-geeks. But think on it. How often have you gone to a book­marked page and then chopped off it’s tail or altered a word or two to get some place when you didn’t feel like typ­ing in some big ass ole URL?

Bliss…