Path Design and Interpretation

There are various differing approaches to the problem of interpreting paths to resources within Web applications, but these can mostly be divided into three categories:

Approach Examples
Path as filesystem WebDAV interface to a repository
Path as resource or service identifier A Web shop with very simple paths, eg. /products, /checkout, /orders
Path as opaque reference An e-mail reader where the messages already have strange and unreadable message identifiers