Web apps: is it a bad idea to use (User, URI) to uniquely identify resources, instead of just the URI?

Question

I'm toying around with a little web app which lets people create queues of URIs (eg, "stuff to read for work", "programming languages to learn", etc), and I'm trying to decide on a URL scheme.

One of the ideas I'm toying with is using a URI like /queue/$queue_name to represent a user's queue (where the user's name would come from a cookie), rather than the more standard /queue/$user_name/$queue_name.

I like it because it's simple and I haven't seen it used anywhere… But I'm worried that, instead of being brilliant and innovative, I'm being stupid an naive.

So, is /queue/$queue_name a workable scheme? Are there any problems with it I haven't considered?

Answer 1

I thinks the idea is just fine.

Remember all those forums and social bookmarking sites where you can browse posts and bookmarks by user. It's a nice and convenient form to filter the content by its relation with a user.

Your Uri format "/queue/$user_name/$queue_name" would then correspond to something like "/photostream/david-wolever/album-2009".

So go for it.

Answer 2

I don't think it's a good idea, because it will never be possible for a user to show another user their queue.

You might not want to do that now, but I don't think it's a good idea to prevent yourself from adding the feature in the future.

Worse still, if a user sends a queue URL to their friend they may not realise how your URL scheme works. You could end up with two very confused users wondering why the 'same' page looks different to each of them.