AEP-2: Canonical URL casing and permanent redirects

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Number

AEP-2 — permanent, never reassigned

Status

review Under public review; a sponsor is shepherding it.

Author

Stanley Sekar

Drafted by an agent

agent_rosetta (Claude)

Sponsor

Stanley Sekar

Ratified by

Not ratified. Only a human can ratify a proposal.

Enforced by

No conformance check yet — so this cannot be called final.

Created

20 August 2026

Discussion

github.com/aDNA-Network/aDNA/issues

Status note. This proposal is in review. It has not been decided and nothing in it is currently required of anyone. It is the first substantive proposal filed under AEP-1.

Summary

Vault names in aDNA are mixed-case and carry a suffix — Operations.aDNA, RareArchive.aDNA. URLs are not. This proposal would make two rules normative for any conforming vault that publishes a web surface:

1. A canonical slug law. A vault’s route slug is lowercase(name) with the .aDNA suffix dropped and anything outside [a-z0-9_-] folded to _. So Operations.aDNA publishes at /vaults/operations/. Display names keep their true casing in content; only URLs normalize.
2. A published URL never dies. When a route changes, the old one issues a 301 to the new one, and that redirect is kept permanently rather than pruned later.

Motivation

Both rules already exist as an internal decision governing one site (ADR-051, adopted 2026-08-18). They were adopted after a census rather than on taste: across all 74 vaults in the registry, the drop-suffix form produced 74 distinct slugs with zero collisions, and 50 of 74 vaults were already routing that way. Keeping the suffix would also have been collision-free — it would just have broken 50 working URLs to fix 24.

The reason to raise it to the standard is that mixed-case URLs are not a style question once vaults start linking to each other. /vaults/RareArchive/ and /vaults/rarearchive/ are different resources to a web server and the same resource to a human, and a federated network of vaults that has not agreed which one is real will accumulate hard 404s between them. This site had 24 of them before the rule was applied.

Specification (proposed)

A conforming vault that publishes a web surface:

• MUST derive route slugs by the law above, and MUST apply it where routes are built rather than where data is written — so that a hand-edited record cannot reintroduce a mixed-case route.
• MUST serve a 301 from any previously published route to its canonical successor.
• MUST NOT remove a redirect once published.
• SHOULD carry a check that fails the build when a non-conforming route appears.

Vaults that publish no web surface are unaffected.

What is unresolved

A draft that lists no open questions is usually a draft that has not been read carefully.

• Scope. Is this a rule about vault routes specifically, or about every route a vault publishes? The census only covered vault routes.
• Non-Latin names. The [a-z0-9_-] fold is defined for ASCII. A vault named in another script would fold to a string of underscores, which is a bug rather than a policy. Transliteration or percent-encoding needs a decision before this could apply generally.
• Enforcement. Under AEP-1’s §4, this cannot reach final until a check in aDNA’s own tooling fails when the rule is violated. One exists for this site (gate-30); a check that ships with the standard, so any vault gets it, does not yet exist. That work is the real cost of this proposal.
• Existing published vaults. The rule is cheap for a vault that has not launched and expensive for one that has. A migration path — likely “apply going forward, redirect the past” — needs writing.

Costs and objections

The honest objection is that this is a web-publishing convention being written into a knowledge-architecture standard, and standards get worse when they annex adjacent domains. A reasonable counter-proposal is that it belongs in a publishing profile rather than the core specification. That question should be settled before this moves out of draft.

State history