[Bioc-devel] WISH: BioC URL shortcut to packages

[Hervé Pagès]

Hi,

On 02/23/2014 03:58 AM, Sean Davis wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 12:32 AM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at biostat.ucsf.edu>wrote:
>
>> Analogously to CRAN URL "shortcuts, e.g.
>>
>>    http://cran.r-project.org/package=digest
>>
>> expanding to
>>
>>    http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/digest/index.html,
>>
>> it would be neat if Bioconductor would support something similar, e.g.
>>
>>    http://bioconductor.org/package=Biostring
>>
>> expanding to
>>
>>    http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/Biostrings.html

Should we also provide a short URL like this for annotation and
experiment packages? For these packages the current permanent URL
is even longer:

 
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/data/annotation/html/org.Hs.eg.db.html
 
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/data/experiment/html/affydata.html

>>
>> Here is a .htaccess RewriteRule (not tested):
>>
>>    RewriteRule ^package=(.*)$ packages/release/bioc/html/$1.html [NC,L]
>>
>> The main purpose is to be able to use shorter URLs in texts; the
>> current ones can sometimes occupy a complete line of text.
>>
>
> I kinda like this idea, also.  I would consider slightly breaking the
> analogy with CRAN, though, and not use the "=" sign and just use another
> slash.
>
> http://bioconductor.org/package/Biostrings

Sounds good to me. I wonder if this shouldn't actually be made the
final URL instead of an URL that redirects to the final URL. People
often copy/paste the URL that shows up in the address bar of their
browser to share it with others. So if there is a redirect, the
long URLs are more likely to be used and shared. But if there is
not, the short URLs are more likely to be used and shared.

H.

>
> Sean
>
>
>>
>> Just a suggestion/wish
>>
>> Henrik
>>
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>>
>
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-- 
Hervé Pagès

Program in Computational Biology
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