June 29, 2003 11:57 PM
Too many software developers just can't bring themselves to implement completely invisible features. They need to show off about what a great feature they just implemented, even at the cost of confusing people. Really great UI design disappears.
I think there's something in that for all of us, and perhaps not just in the field of UI design.
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[via Erik, Charles]: Joel gets it right in his short comment about invisible software features:Unnecessary UIs [...] that pop up to brag about a cool feature the developer implemented are a little bit obnoxious. Too many software developers just can't... Read More
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To a point it makes sense, but is there a point when software starts doing too much behind the scenes, and it becomes impossible to get a mental model of what the software does for you?
We've all had to track down exactly why a piece of software is behaving in a certain unexpected way.
And more specifically to the post, how permanent is a permanent redirect? Would automatically updating the bookmark interfere with some load distribution systems? (ie, think of the lawN machines at hormail?)
A permanent redirect is just that. rfc2616 is pretty clear:
"10.3.2 301 Moved Permanently
"The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise."