How to come up with good slugs used as filenames / identifier "playname"

[ingoboerner]

Explain the "implicit design principles" of creating slugs that are used as filenames in the Encoding Guidelines.

What are the rules here?

[cmil]

Off the top of my head these are the rules I have been following so far:

• slugs should consist of the last name of the author followed by the title of the play (for single author corpora the author name can be omitted; if there are multiple authors with the same last name within the same corpus first name initials can be included)
• all lowercase alphanumeric ASCII-only characters
• words are separated by dashes ("-"), not underscores (I usually also substitute apostrophes with dashes)
• interpunction in titles is stripped
• keep in mind that filenames / play name identifiers end up in URLs; shorter URL are nicer and easier to handle than long ones, so if you have very long titles consider shortening them somewhat in the slug; only include subtitles when necessary for disambiguation