I’m quite thrilled by a recent commit to Rails: the dropping of the semi-colon separator in resource routes. Before now, the semi-colon was being used to distinguish non-CRUD actions on resources. From DHH’s commit message on the subject:
It (the semi-colon) was a neat idea, but lots of the non-crud actions turned out not to be RPC (as the ; was primarily intended to discourage), but legitimate sub-resources, like /parties/recent, which didn’t deserve the uglification of /parties;recent. Further more, the semicolon caused issues with caching and HTTP authentication in Safari. Just Not Worth It [DHH]
The ‘edit’ action is a good example. Edit isn’t really a CRUD action. The CRUD action that ultimately works on edit is update, however, we need to edit to display the html forms we need to modify the resource in our browsers.
I’ll confess to never having liked the semi-colon. It was just too ugly. I understand that the ugliness was, of course, intentional, but it still made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I also enjoyed DHH’s coining of the acronym: JNWI (Just Not Worth It).
