Ambiguous URLs

(Oh dear, he is complaining again)

Flickr have released a new section on their website called Places. It is all about browsing photographs in a geographical context, something I am pretty [keen][2] on ….

Such a shame then that they have done it all wrong :)

OK, so maybe not ALL wrong, but look at this example and tell me they got the URL hierarchy correct for the UK.

The URLs appear in this form :

http://www.flickr.com/places/COUNTRY/REGION/TOWN

looks sensible enough right? Until you see how it is used :

http://www.flickr.com/places/United+Kingdom/England/Brixton

OK, you say, so what is the problem?

Well in England there are at least two Brixtons that I know of, the one where I live in south London and one in Devon, near Plymouth. Do a search in the Places page and two Brixtons come up in the results, unfortunately they both have the same URL, and it points to the one in Devon.

I imagine this has happened to many places in Britain that share names.

IMHO it is the choice of regions in the UK that has caused this. Someone decided that the top-level regions in the UK are England, Scotland, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Wales etc. Whereas I would say that from the point of view of wanting to disambiguate the URLs as much as possible, the names of counties should have been used.

Then we could have had : [http://www.flickr.com/places/United+Kingdom/Devon/Brixton][3] [http://www.flickr.com/places/United+Kingdom/London/Brixton][4]

While writing this and testing URLs I was playing with yesterday, I am seeing different results, so this indicates, I hope, that someone is tinkering, anyhow it was amusing yesterday to find that the place where I have lived for the last 30 years “does not exist on the planet”.

As it is, the nearest I can drill down to my home is London, and this is a shame.

[2]: {% post_url 2007-08-30-metadata-madness %} [3]: http://www.flickr.com/places/United+Kingdom/Devon/Brixton [4]: http://www.flickr.com/places/United+Kingdom/London/Brixton