I'm not Pat, but I still feel intitled to give my 2 cents on your questions.
Exclamation marks were intended to make sites more accessable by web crawlers. At least in the past, search engines skipped the Query_String (the part following ?) when indexing websites. This was considered to indicate dynamically generated content, so following those links might degrade server performance. Furthermore the content might have be taylored to each specific surfer in some way (e.g. depending on surfers IP address), so the results might not have been worth indexing, anyway. Problems with this policy are: All URLs that differ in the Query_String only, are considered to be equal, links that depend on a Query_String, might even point to an error page.
I said "were intemded", because looking at our weblogs, I don't think that this is still the case, at least with Google. As (probably) the majority of internet contents are provided by some sort of CMS nowadays, this behaviour is no longer appropriate. Additionaly, the exclamation mark is no longer accepted on R6 servers by default. Your have to manually add an environment variable to make Domino 6 recognize these URLs, when they are calculated inside your application. This does however not apply to domino-generated links (if you enabled the corresponding option in the server document). Consequentially, I consider the use of exclamation marks to be deprecated.
While omitting openView, openDocument, etc. URL commands may make URLs look more pretty, I don't see any technical advantage here, quite the contrary: Before opening this resource, the server has to check wether the named element to open is a view, a form, a page or whatever. This should be potentially slower than using full URL commands.
Plus signs on the other hand are - to the best of my knowlege - perfectly legal replacements for blanks, as a more readable alternative to %20.
Concerning your last point: What if the view you are accessing happens to contain 4001 docs? Yes, you wont see the last one and you won't even know. Why replace a mechanism that works fully dynamically with somethin static for no special reason?
I'm not Pat, but I still feel intitled to give my 2 cents on your questions.
Exclamation marks were intended to make sites more accessable by web crawlers. At least in the past, search engines skipped the Query_String (the part following ?) when indexing websites. This was considered to indicate dynamically generated content, so following those links might degrade server performance. Furthermore the content might have be taylored to each specific surfer in some way (e.g. depending on surfers IP address), so the results might not have been worth indexing, anyway. Problems with this policy are: All URLs that differ in the Query_String only, are considered to be equal, links that depend on a Query_String, might even point to an error page.
I said "were intemded", because looking at our weblogs, I don't think that this is still the case, at least with Google. As (probably) the majority of internet contents are provided by some sort of CMS nowadays, this behaviour is no longer appropriate. Additionaly, the exclamation mark is no longer accepted on R6 servers by default. Your have to manually add an environment variable to make Domino 6 recognize these URLs, when they are calculated inside your application. This does however not apply to domino-generated links (if you enabled the corresponding option in the server document). Consequentially, I consider the use of exclamation marks to be deprecated.
While omitting openView, openDocument, etc. URL commands may make URLs look more pretty, I don't see any technical advantage here, quite the contrary: Before opening this resource, the server has to check wether the named element to open is a view, a form, a page or whatever. This should be potentially slower than using full URL commands.
Plus signs on the other hand are - to the best of my knowlege - perfectly legal replacements for blanks, as a more readable alternative to %20.
Concerning your last point: What if the view you are accessing happens to contain 4001 docs? Yes, you wont see the last one and you won't even know. Why replace a mechanism that works fully dynamically with somethin static for no special reason?
Let me know if you disagree.