SEP 9: Metadata: Document alts

A previous version of this proposal was called Frontmatter defined redirect rules. This was later changed to Metadata: document alts

Add a ‘redirects’ fontmatter element to site. Should support a list of alternate slugs that redirect to the canonical one, for when a url wants changing. Should also

Support multiple (a list of) alternate slugs. This would have the related benefit of allowing for ‘shortcodes’ to be defined, eg. silasjelley.com/dd could redirect to silasjelley/design-document
Ideally would support also specifying the HTTP code of the redirect (301 Permanent, 302 Temporary, etc)

Questions to answer:

Should multiple canonical urls be permitted to allow a document to be reached without redirect at multiple paths? My feeling is this would be a bad precedent and I can’t see any situation where it is likely to be useful.
How can the redirects be implemented on the web server? Will first have to investigate whether there is a static-file protocol for redirects.

Aliases

I like the idea of calling these aliases, because in a sense every URL is an alias in that it refers to the actual thing but is not in and of itself… that thing.

The new metadata element aliases would surplant the current slug element. This development does not address any of the webserver portion of implementing this behaviour.

Alternatively, alts or alt