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by dmix 2038 days ago
Two rather insignificant observations:

- the video scaffold redirected to localhost:8000/Posts why in the world are the controller paths capitalized? So rare to see that but somehow I'm less surprised in haskell

- the name sounds a lot like i-Hop and I can't get it out of my head now and it will forever be that. First impressions have a way of sticking around

Otherwise I like the opinionated direction they chose. Especially being a dev-shop we're using it for ourselves so we don't really care about taking a community-census type approach to things. They only care about what works for creating real things.

Having gone down the Haskell road, letting someone make the hundreds of early choices for you seems to be the best way to go for early adoption. Typically the under-layers remain abstract enough for the true hackers, which also seems to be the case here (from reading about the blaze-html integration).

Which I always believe is a solid foundation for any useful framework. The demanded customizations can always be supported later. Modularization tends to come later as a project matures, but the early days it's best to take a singular path that works for the founding team until maturity is reached and wait/see if it does indeed become popular first to justify the more modular/customizable approach.

I haven't tried it myself though but I seem to be close to the target market being both a past Rails dev and a Haskell fan. So I'll keep it on the back burner for until I have time.

1 comments

Thanks for your thoughts!

> why in the world are the controller paths capitalized

The idea behind that is that it makes mapping from url to action easier when trying to understand how things work.

E.g. `/Posts` maps to `PostsAction`. `/NewUser` maps to `NewUserAction`.

I think longterm urls don't matter that much anymore as many browsers just hide them completly (think Safari, many mobile browsers, etc.), so we optimize them for development purposes :)

(Disclaimer: Founder of digitally induced, the company behind IHP)

Please let's not help with the efforts to hide the URL by spreading this sentiment. It's a misguided move that will only make users more helpless and the web more mysterious for them.

I'm increasingly encountering users that have trouble understanding that they should copy the URL to someone if they want to share a web page with them. Humans are logical creatures: if they see a part of the system that is constant, they will deduce that it could not have had an impact on the part that is changing. In the case of the URL this is an incorrect conclusion, but the UX from bad actors like Apple and Google is steering the user towards it.

If the intent is to show the host more prominently, then the URL should be visually split into the (more prominent) host part and the path part. The path part should not be simply hidden.

I disagree with that perspective.

So far, hyperlinks have not gone away.

But which style of concatenation of words is surely subjective. I would have thought that FooBar -> foo-bar was the ad-hoc standard, but even then, people handle corner cases differently, such as “what if the word you’re url-ifying contains a dash?”

I consider this 'an opinion to get started quickly', it's easy to change if you wish ;-)
not a good idea to leak implementation details in the url/interface. think about facebook with all those .php urls.
Another reason why urls (still) matter: SEO.