3 ms·

> Most websites not having human-readable URL's What problems human-readable URLs solve in the context of URL shortening and modern websites? Their benefit in

> Most websites not having human-readable URL's What problems human-readable URLs solve in the context of URL shortening and modern websites? Their benefit in the past was that on websites with clear hierarchy you could strip URL path or change a word, thus quickly navigating on a site without resorting to clunky menus or site maps, but modern web doesn't look like that, and "human-readable URLs" slightly changed their appearance over the time too. I find modern auto-generated URLs like, say, news.ycombinator.com/item/21867994-Kutt-a-modern-open-source-URL-shortener to be much inferior: 1. they're longer and much harder to type by hand (and I've seen websites where lowercasing or omission of a single letter past the id results in 404) 2. they don't work well when the author decides to change title (and even HN submission titles change a lot, often multiple times as a result of a long discussion). In fact, (1) is exactly the reason why one would consider using URL shortener today: it's so much easier to dictate and type in by hand!

smichel17 7y ago
"Modern" URIs don't have to be unusable. Discourse is a good example of this done right. If HN used discourse style urls, the example you gave above would look like this: news.ycombinator.com/item/21867994/Kutt-a-modern-open-source-URL-shortener/ Further, several redirects are created, so you can access it at any of these uris: news.ycombinator.com/item/21867994 news.ycombinator.com/item/Kutt-a-modern-open-source-URL-shortener/ news.ycombinator.com/item/21867994/arbitrary-text-here The last form means that when the title changes, the canonical uri can be updated without breaking links to the old location. The only unstable form is the second, without the id.
rsync 7y ago
"What problems human-readable URLs solve in the context of URL shortening and modern websites?" The problem arises anytime you need to cut and paste, or otherwise transport, a URL between components that aren't directly linked ... If all you're doing is click-click-clicking like a good end-user, it probably doesn't matter - but if you need the URL for some reason, it can be very difficult - especially in a terminal - to properly move around a 500 character URL.

smichel17 7y ago

"Modern" URIs don't have to be unusable. Discourse is a good example of this done right. If HN used discourse style urls, the example you gave above would look like this: news.ycombinator.com/item/21867994/Kutt-a-modern-open-source-URL-shortener/ Further, several redirects are created, so you can access it at any of these uris: news.ycombinator.com/item/21867994 news.ycombinator.com/item/Kutt-a-modern-open-source-URL-shortener/ news.ycombinator.com/item/21867994/arbitrary-text-here The last form means that when the title changes, the canonical uri can be updated without breaking links to the old location. The only unstable form is the second, without the id.

rsync 7y ago

"What problems human-readable URLs solve in the context of URL shortening and modern websites?" The problem arises anytime you need to cut and paste, or otherwise transport, a URL between components that aren't directly linked ... If all you're doing is click-click-clicking like a good end-user, it probably doesn't matter - but if you need the URL for some reason, it can be very difficult - especially in a terminal - to properly move around a 500 character URL.