Stolen from Bob Aman's excellent answer on Stack Overflow

General principles for good URI design:

• Don't use query parameters to alter state
• Don't use mixed-case paths if you can help it; lowercase is best
• Don't use implementation-specific extensions in your URIs (.php, .py, .pl, etc.)
• Don't fall into RPC with your URIs
• Do limit your URI space as much as possible
• Do keep path segments short