2 ms·

If URLs are read by humans, they need to be human readable. If you use a prominently displayed name to contain crap like "?id=22107823" which is meaningless to

If URLs are read by humans, they need to be human readable. If you use a prominently displayed name to contain crap like "?id=22107823" which is meaningless to most users, then get off a search engine. Nobody needs to see that. Give it a human readable name if you want humans to read it or hide it completely if you don't. It's amazing how long unreadable URLs have lingered. I'm all for them being as hidden as HTML code. Even if you have a lot of pages, you can still make a readable URL, like The New York Times "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/style/modern-love-podcast-jessalyn-gilsig.html" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/style/modern-love-podcast.... None of that except perhaps "https://" https://" and ".html" are mysterious computer codes.

userbinator 7y ago
"?id=22107823" which is meaningless to most users Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter, but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729 People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hiding things from them... why?
- lopmotr 7y ago
  People figured out how to make phone calls with numbers too, even area codes and special 0's in front. But it was an ugly mess necessitated by the technology. This isn't necessary. Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you've seen before. Yes keep them stupid and hide things from them. That's an important part of how computers became popular. A lot of people were excluded in the days of command line everything.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    No, no, no! There's another comment here which sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "Don't make me think" has turned into "Don't let me think", and that is a disturbingly dangerous direction for freedom from corporate/government control. Society would be very different today if, several hundred years ago, the "ruling elite" decided that literacy should be discouraged.

userbinator 7y ago

"?id=22107823" which is meaningless to most users Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter, but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729 People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hiding things from them... why?

lopmotr 7y ago
People figured out how to make phone calls with numbers too, even area codes and special 0's in front. But it was an ugly mess necessitated by the technology. This isn't necessary. Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you've seen before. Yes keep them stupid and hide things from them. That's an important part of how computers became popular. A lot of people were excluded in the days of command line everything.
- userbinator 7y ago
  No, no, no! There's another comment here which sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "Don't make me think" has turned into "Don't let me think", and that is a disturbingly dangerous direction for freedom from corporate/government control. Society would be very different today if, several hundred years ago, the "ruling elite" decided that literacy should be discouraged.