5 ms·
> But over time, URLs have gotten more and more difficult to read and understand. As web functionality has expanded, URLs have increasingly become unintelligibl
by pferde 8y ago
> But over time, URLs have gotten more and more difficult to read and understand. As web functionality has expanded, URLs have increasingly become unintelligible strings of gibberish combining components from third-parties or being masked by link shorteners and redirect schemes.
There's no reason a well-behaved web sire (or application) needs to have a complicated URLs, that's just bad design. No need to scrap the entire concept of URLs because some people use it improperly.
- cwkoss 8y agoYeah, I think Google could accomplish a similar result by publishing a 'nice URL' standard, where your page can be dinged on SEO if it does not conform. Getting rid of the thousands of ugly URLs used by their own products could also go a long way...
- Reedx 8y agoI'd be curious to see what people would consider that to be. Using HN as an example, what would the nice URL look like for this page?
- pferde 8y agoThere's not much room for improvement there. However, the page I am writing this reply on could - it's: <https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=17913014&goto=item%3Fid%3D17911009%2317913014> https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=17913014&goto=item%3Fi..., which is getting ugly. The prime candidates for URL deuglification would be sites like amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Bushnell-Falcon-133410-Binoculars-Black/dp/B00004TBLW?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=e783a840-dc64-47f3-93ad-50aaa33da140&pf_rd_r=0YK0VWY7DVGGMPH0EG9E https://www.amazon.com/Bushnell-Falcon-133410-Binoculars-Bla... I mean, what the hell are all those identifiers, and why should anyone besides amazon.com's internal staff even see them?
- merb 8y agoactually your amazon link is a reflink, the whole amazon link is just: https://www.amazon.com/Bushnell-Falcon-133410-Binoculars-Black/dp/B00004TBLW https://www.amazon.com/Bushnell-Falcon-133410-Binoculars-Bla... which is basically the product name + model number + asin ASIN: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification_Number https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification... Link can also be shortened to just the asin. (ASIN = ISBN applied to everything)
- pferde 8y agoThanks for the info, but the link I pasted was taken by just going to www.amazon.com front page, and copying the link for the "Deal of the day" product I saw there. So it's the link all customers see when they click on the products, and no amount of explaining what it is makes it go away, or justifies it being there in the first place. Still, Amazon is far from the worst offender. I have seen kilometer long URLs that can span several lines of text.
- cwkoss 8y agoI would like meaningful subdomain names, avoid putting data (particularly if it needs URL encoding) in query params, try to make urls somewhat parsable by non-technical humans.
- cwkoss 8y agoAlso tracking codes in URLs are kind of crummy because they impose a cost to the user that typically only benefits the publisher. Could be cool to write a tool that automatically strips tracking codes when you copy a URL to clipboard that contains one. Or randomizes tracking codes!