8 ms·

Examples of Great URL Design (2023)

• wizerno 2y ago
  An example of a not-so-great URL design: Amazon product links have an optional slug before everything else like `{slug}/dp/{id}`. So you end up copying a gigantic URL everytime you wish to share a product unless you use the share product button to get the shortened link.
  • robin_reala 2y ago
    I just delete everything after the product ID manually. There are probably easier methods.
    • yoavm 2y ago
      The point is that the id comes last.
      • layer8 2y ago
        Which makes sense because URLs are often displayed such that only a prefix is visible. And for editing, it’s still easy to cut and paste the ID.
  • xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
    I think this is actually a really great design in that the name of the product can always be in the URL. The "slug" is completely ignored and just there for SEO/humans. If you send a link I instantly know what it's for -- that's pretty useful! I also like that the "id" which is an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) which is a superset of all ISBNs. This means you can just enter any book ISBN directly into the browser and end up on the right page (at least historically) instead of having to search for it.
    • pests 2y ago
      This got a major retailor (Walmart maybe?) into issues awhile back as they were pulling the product title (only) from this param so people were having a heyday "renaming" official products on the official site.
    • wizerno 2y ago
      While the slug helps someone know what they're opening before reading it, most apps have link previews which give you just enough information you need.
      • namrog84 2y ago
        I dont know if I'm in the minority but I really dislike link previews the vast majority of the time. They take up too much space and offer to little value. In discord I often x out of the preview and I know lots of others who do too. Maybe on some sites it's fine but I feel like link previews need more modularity on size or something. Perbaps even configurable both host and client
        • xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
          You're not in the minority. The information density of the preview has to match, if not exceed, that of the context in which it is provided. Most of the times it's a placeholder image with less text than the URL itself.
    • fsckboy 2y ago
      >>Amazon product links have an optional slug BEFORE everything else >I think this is actually a really great design in that the name of the product can always be in the URL he said "before". you could accomplish your goal putting the slug "after". he's making the point that having a place after which you can harmlessly delete the rest of the url is better than having embedded NOPs surrounded by identifying information (not that the average user will ever edit any url, but there is still merit in what he said that you missed, and he's not disagreeing with you)
  • chamomeal 2y ago
    Lol this is almost the exact same thing as the very first example of good URI design in the article
    • wizerno 2y ago
      If you're referring to the StackOverflow example from the article, it's different because they follow `/questions/:id/:slug`. Keeping slug at the end makes it a lot easier to delete while keeping it readable.
  • layer8 2y ago
    It’s not that difficult to shorten it to the minimal “/dp/:id”. I always take care to do that when sharing an Amazon link.
  • ryukoposting 2y ago
    At least that stuff is actually informative to a human. A lot of Amazon's URL bloat is the analytics crap they shove into query string. I started using ClearURLs specifically because of Amazon.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    It is a curious decision why they chose to put the ID before the slug. Stack Overflow, in contrast, puts the ID first, followed by an often very long slug. Which seems to be the more common pattern generally, as far as I can tell. I do wonder what their rationale was/is.
  • JohnFen 2y ago
    > So you end up copying a gigantic URL everytime you wish to share a product Yeah, when I used Amazon I found this incredibly annoying. When I wanted to share a link, I'd have to spend a few minutes figuring out how much of that stuff I could remove and testing the resulting URL before sharing it. A relatively minor irritation, but an irritation nonetheless.
    • fsckboy 2y ago
      having, like you, studied amazon urls, I just automatically delete everything?inclusive after the "?", then I edit the slug to make it contain a message personalized for my recipient
• aejm 2y ago
  What’s the best way to handle url slugs that change? For example, if I have www.example.com/page/foo, and the user changes that page’s title to bar, the slug updates to www.example.com/page/bar and anyone visiting the old url gets automatically redirected to the new one. But now the old slug of foo can’t be used again (without appending some unique identifier to it, like foo-th683gh9i).
  • msoad 2y ago
    The first example is just that. Put the id in the URL and make the slug optional. Stackoverflow makes the slug completely optional but you have the choice of only accepting foo and bar in your example
    • Traubenfuchs 2y ago
      > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78870603/i-LOVE-genocide https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78870603/i-LOVE-genocide This is bad.
      • christina97 2y ago
        No you redirect to the right place. It’s no worse than writing obscene things in a URL fragment (after #) that doesn’t even get sent to the server.
      • hmry 2y ago
        What is the actual harm in allowing people to put random text at the end of the url? Not to mention something similar can be done to any url, e.g. #whatever-you-want or ?_=whatever-you-want
      • alpinisme 2y ago
        It’s not great but it matters less when the content you get going to that page is so unremarkable. Don’t forget you can do that to any url, even of sites that don’t use optional slugs, if your goal is just vague, evil-by-link-appearance.
      • 2y ago
• promiseofbeans 2y ago
  Shout out to the classic "Cool URIs don't change": https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
  • mro_name 2y ago
    … and Aaron Swartz's "Building for Users: Designing URLs" https://codeberg.org/mro/ProgrammableWebSwartz2013/src/branch/master/content/pages/2-building-for-users.md https://codeberg.org/mro/ProgrammableWebSwartz2013/src/branc...
  • gregorkas 2y ago
    ... and the classic Penisland: https://www.penisland.net/ https://www.penisland.net/
    • Hamuko 2y ago
      I was once linked fagasstraps.com on an IRC channel and I expected something else.
    • ceejayoz 2y ago
      I still chuckle at the expertsexchange.com -> experts-exchange.com migration.
      • ralferoo 2y ago
        also https://antiquesexchange.com/ https://antiquesexchange.com/ (now gone)
    • ralferoo 2y ago
      There was another classic from that era, powergenitalia.com, which purported to be the Italian division of Powergen, has now disappeared and apparently was a prank. Interestingly, some of the early captures of it seem to be another company, so maybe it was just an early attempt at SEO and they might have removed it due to the risk of being sued for trademark infringement: https://web.archive.org/web/20040830080331/http://powergenitalia.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040830080331/http://powergenit...
• yoshyosh 2y ago
  Love this. A big miss teams have are with affiliate/refer a friend urls. Like if you think of your Uber referral code being 5 characters instead of a general 16 character hash. Shorter makes it easier for people to remember and share their code. e.g. RJF01 vs ab0fhct99fh2h4fqi2fj9
• msoad 2y ago
  One big question in URL design is this: Do path parameters get to have / in their values? Let’s say you have a link shortener service and want to allow users to define shortcuts like /mypath/:rest where rest is appended to example.com/ Now you’re in a very interesting position when it comes to resolving URLs. Curious to hear folks with experience in this
  • wizerno 2y ago
    As per RFC 3986 [1], reserved characters such as , and / must be URL encoded. , is encoded as %2C / is encoded as %2F [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986
    • msoad 2y ago
      That's not the question. The question is what if you have an open ended URL param that can also have subpaths?
  • vrnvu 2y ago
    This can be a complex topic if you don’t set clear constraints on what constitutes a valid character in your URL or domain. For instance, in query parameters, spaces are encoded as '+'. But what if '+' is also a valid character in your domain? You then need to disambiguate i.e between "name?foo+bar" meaning "foo bar" or "foo+bar". Which one is the user actually referring to? In our case, we ended up needing users to send the name in the body, and now we have to manage multiple encoding protocols (url, queryparam, the body...).
    • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      Wouldn't you just encode the "+" if you wanted it as a literal?
      • vrnvu 2y ago
        A better example is the name: "foo%20bar". A user might have entities named "foo bar", "foo%20bar", and "foo%2520bar". Sometimes, mistakes happened because users forgot to double encode or they used the wrong protocol. As this names were used in URL, query parameters, and the body, and each has its own. As I mentioned, with clear constraints and rules, we can accomplish anything we need, it can get complex. My takeaway from this project is to limit the valid characters and make it simple for everyone.
• frereubu 2y ago
  I can't check this because I'm on mobile, but I presume Stack Overflow uses a canonical tag in the HTML to state their preference that the longer version with the slug should be the default, because that's the one search engines use.
  • aembleton 2y ago
    Stack Overflow returns with a 301 and a location header containing the slug. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16245767 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16245767 Responds with a 301 and a location header value of `/questions/16245767/creating-a-blob-from-a-base64-string-in-javascript`
• pornel 2y ago
  Using a numeric ID + ignored path part is easy to implement, but actually using the textual part without an exposed ID seems more elegant to me. Tip for implementing that: * have a separate table that maps slugs to IDs, allowing many-to-one relationship, because content's title will be updated, and you don't want to break old links. * long slugs will get truncated by users. A zero-cost way to recover from that is `select id where slug >= ? order by slug limit 1` * in either case don't forget to redirect to the canonical URL, so that people can't create duplicate or misleading URLs on your site.
  • lifthrasiir 2y ago
    I don't like slug-only URLs because they are hard to make concise. If the textual part can be compressed into one or two words, like what qntm does in his website, then it is okay, but most schemes do not really care much about slugs...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • RugnirViking 2y ago
    the problem with that, as mentioned in the article, is that that breaks if the content of the page changes. So on stack overflow for example, what happens if someone changes the title of their question? you either break the url or use an old version of the title, thus being misleading.
    • atlintots 2y ago
      that's what the many-to-one slug-to-id mapping is for
    • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      Changing the title of the question is the real wtf.
• p4bl0 2y ago
  Similar to the Slack example given in the post with /is/ URLs, KDE has /for/ URLs with pages which present the KDE project and software for various user profiles: developers, kids, scientists, students, creators, gamers, activists, etc. See all these pages here: https://kde.org/for/ https://kde.org/for/
• ricardo81 2y ago
  id's that skip the textual part on their lookup/url validation and also don't redirect are not ideal, probably as bad as soft 404s. Maybe not as bad for bots if the canonical tag shows the intended URL. Personally I'd avoid using id's and use a 32-bit hash of the URL which is more or less as performant as a straight id lookup. I usually went with murmurhash.
• nabla9 2y ago
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16245767/sex-robots https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16245767/sex-robots
• imrehg 2y ago
  I found Notion's URL schema interesting as well. They have to contend with renames of pages, reorganisation of the hierarchy and all that. So they have something like: notion.so/:account/Current-Name-of-Page-:pageid where the name changes if the page is renamed, but the redirect works, as the page ID is unchanged. In fact, one can just use notion.so/:account/:pageid and gets redirected to the right page, or even notion.so/:account/Anything-else-:pageid works too... This is very handy in my use cases, when various Notion data is extracted into another tool, reassembled, and then needed to have a link to the original page. I don't need to worry about the page's name, or how that name gets converted into the URL, or any race conditions.... The page hierarchy is then just within the navigaton, not in the URL, so moved pages continue to work too (even if this looks like a flatter hierarchy than it really is). I'm sure there are plenty of drawbacks, but I've found it an interesting, pragmatic solution.
  • aqfamnzc 2y ago
    I believe amazon does something similar for product pages. The `/dp/` is the product id that really matters.
  • dgb23 2y ago
    I don't understand why the :pageid needs to be prefixed with anything here.
    • bathtub365 2y ago
      So you can tell what the URL might point to by looking at it. That’s one of the important things mentioned in the article linked on this HN post: URLs are used by both computers and people.
    • dijit 2y ago
      its for humans I would expect, to know what the page refers to without opening it. Kinda smart. Also; taking it from the end means you only need to parse the string as an offset from the end. It can make load balancing much faster in theory.
• kijin 2y ago
  I might be an outlier, but I don't like slugs in URLs. They make URLs unnecessarily long, often forcing people to use URL shorteners -- completely defeating the purpose. They get awkward when the author changes the title. Other commenters mentioned some tricks to get around this issue, but all involve redirects. Cools URLs shouldn't change in the first place. They don't copy cleanly if you use nonalphanumeric characters, as in nearly every language other than English. Virtually nobody just looks at a URL these days anyway, with all the search engines, cute thumbnails, and OpenGraph metadata that provide a glimpse of the actual content for you before you even click on it. This is doubly true in the non-English-speaking parts of the world where a slug in a shared URL is often just a jumble of %HEX. Hand-picked words in URLs are fine, e.g. /about/me. I'm only talking about autogenerated slugs for user-submitted content above.
  • betagam 2y ago
    On the other hand, slugs may save you a long page load. Which is useful for users with slow internet.
  • Sharparam 2y ago
    > They don't copy cleanly if you use nonalphanumeric characters, as in nearly every language other than English. I haven't noticed this ever being an issue. At least in Firefox, non-ASCII characters will show as-is in the URL bar, but in the copied URL they will be properly encoded.
    • kijin 2y ago
      Of course they work properly once you paste them into a browser. But then you've visited the URL. One alleged justification for slugs is that they allow people to guess what the URL is about without actually visiting it. This usually happens in forums, comments, text messages, and other places where people can only use plain text. But non-ASCII slugs look undecipherable in exactly such places.
  • dbg31415 2y ago
    URL shorteners are more for UTM tracking codes. Those get long.
• bnc319 2y ago
  I forget where I ran across it, but one interesting adoption of URL design is to make the root of the directory part of the site's domain name. I.e. there was someone's website that was shared on HN, where their name was assembled with the domain name, TLD, and some characters after the first slash: firstna.me/lastname/ firstna.me/lastname/about
  • p1nkpineapple 2y ago
    For another example, the recently featured https://fastht.ml/ https://fastht.ml/
  • tomooot 2y ago
    One example that springs to mind is the documentation site for WLED, an incredibly powerful microcontroller firmware for controlling addressable LEDs: https://kno.wled.ge/ https://kno.wled.ge/
  • toyg 2y ago
    This arguably started with del.icio.us.
    • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      And I'm so glad they eventually registered delicious.com (or whatever it was) because remembering exactly where those "."s went was a real pain.
• TreetopPlace 2y ago
  I don't think will be relevant going forward, Safari already hides the URL beyond the domain name by default, and I presume other browsers do/will too.
  • kibwen 2y ago
    As the article mentions, URLs are used in more contexts than being displayed in the address bar, so the content remains relevant regardless of Safari's poor aesthetic decisions.
  • al_borland 2y ago
    This can be turned off. It’s one of the first things I do when getting a new Mac.
• pottekkat 2y ago
  [dead]
• jbverschoor 2y ago
  What about the trailing slash? It annoys the hell out of me, but apple also seems to use it
  • dbg31415 2y ago
    Doesn’t matter. Use them, don’t. Doesn’t matter.
• ttepasse 2y ago
  We take the typical blog url design (/2024/08/14/slug) for granted but back in the very early 2000s pretty much every blog tool had its own URL design. Matthew Thomas back then took an inventory: https://web.archive.org/web/20030810201315/http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2003/07/26#a534 https://web.archive.org/web/20030810201315/http://mpt.phrase... He was on the search for his ultimate blogging system, where this "cruft-free" URL structure should be used: https://web.archive.org/web/20051107103030/http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2003/05/02#a507 https://web.archive.org/web/20051107103030/http://mpt.phrase... I could have sworn there was a changeset in which Matt Mullenweg was implementing those cruft-free URLs in his new fork called Wordpress, but trying for google for something with "Wordpress" from the early 2000s is basically impossible in 2024. Update: I found this: https://ma.tt/2004/08/mike-on-uris/ https://ma.tt/2004/08/mike-on-uris/
  • toyg 2y ago
    Well, arguably both Movable Type and Radio Userland's URLs were already pretty cruft-free. The success of Wordpress was mostly due to other factors (free, php, great feeds, great markup in default templates, great support for plugins).
  • twic 2y ago
    He calls file extensions cruft, but i've come to value them. They are a simple way to indicate file type - desired or offered - which is easily understood by machines and people. I currently work with an API which does a bit of content negotiation using the Accept header, so clients can request data in various formats - application/json for a snapshot, text/event-stream for an updating feed, or text/html for an interactive dashboard. I wish it didn't. I wish we'd just used file extensions. Trivial to use in a browser or via curl, trivial to implement on either side.
    • svieira 2y ago
      For _APIs_ I prefer to use both - the only downside is that resource names need to be restricted to _not_ include trailing `.{EXT}`s (either at all or limiting EXT to things that aren't valid content types). E. g. `/books` - looks at the `Accept` header. `/books.json` - sets the `Accept` header to `application/json`. `/books.xml` - `application/xml`, and so on.
• skc 2y ago
  Microsoft have left the chat
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• franze 2y ago
  These are my URL rules, in any project where I or my clients violate one of the rules - or their priority, we will regret it down the road. URL-rules URL-Rule 1: unique (1 URL == 1 resource, 1 resource == 1 URL) URL-Rule 2: permanent (they do not change, no dependencies to anything) URL-Rule 3: manageable (equals measurable, 1 logic per site section, no complicated exceptions, no exceptions) URL-Rule 4: easily scalable logic URL-Rule 5: short URL-Rule 6: with a variation (partial) of the targeted phrase URL-Rule 1 is more important than 1 to 6 combined, URL-Rule 2 is more important than 2 to 6 combined, URL-Rule 3 is more important than 3 to 6 combined, URL-Rule 4 is more important than 4 to 6 combined. URL-Rule 5 and 6 are a trade-off. 6 is the least important. A truly search optimized URL must fulfill all URL-Rules. My preferred URL structure is: https://www.example.com/%short-namespace%/%unique-slug% https://www.example.com/%short-namespace%/%unique-slug% https:// https:// – protocol www – subdomain example – brand .com – general TLD or country TLD %short-namespace% – one or two letters that identify the page type, no dependency to any site hierarchy %unique-slug% – only use a-z, 0-9, and – in the slug, no double — and no – or – at the end. Only use “speaking slugs” if you have them under your total editorial control. i.e.: https://www.example.com/a/artikel-name https://www.example.com/a/artikel-name https://www.example.com/c/cool-list https://www.example.com/c/cool-list https://www.example.com/p/12345 https://www.example.com/p/12345 (does not fulfill the least important URL-Rule 6) https://www.example.com/p/12345-product-name https://www.example.com/p/12345-product-name
• shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
  Understanding the URL structure of any site can also help you see things that are not accessible through the UI.
  • n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
    Be aware of CFAA tho
    • shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
      Yes, for ethical uses and purposes
• hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
  > Granted, it can also be used deceptively. For example, this is the same URL as above but it portends completely different contents (without breaking the link): > stackoverflow.com/questions/16245767/how-to-bake-a-cake Fortunately for SO the fake slug is not preserved and redirects to the real one (so e.g. stackoverflow.com/questions/16245767/motheficker is not served from their site), much to the chagrin those of us with childish sense of humor who some 25 years ago enjoyed dynamically generated nonsense like: https://web.archive.org/web/20031007123544/http://john.isgay.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20031007123544/http://john.isgay...
• Super_Jambo 2y ago
  We had: https://stopthetories.vote/for/greens https://stopthetories.vote/for/greens https://stopthetories.vote/for/labour https://stopthetories.vote/for/labour https://stopthetories.vote/for/libdems https://stopthetories.vote/for/libdems https://stopthetories.vote/for/heart https://stopthetories.vote/for/heart
• AstroJetson 2y ago
  Wordpress gives a few good options to use slugs or names in a hierarchy.
• robin_reala 2y ago
  Back when I was working on GOV.UK Verify we had URLs that looked something like /verify-passport for English and /cy/verify-passport for Welsh. I made the decision that if readable URLs was a design goal they should be readable in both languages, and ended up localising them all to (for example) /verify-passport and /gwirio-pasbort. No idea if anyone ever noticed, but sometimes it’s nice to sweat the small stuff.
  • marcinreal 2y ago
    I had the same thought for a restaurant website that served multiple languages. I figured customers might glance at the URL when it's being shared, and appreciate it being in their language. What do you do when the translated slug happens to be the same in multiple languages? I ended up still having the country code in the slug.
    • robin_reala 2y ago
      Luckily we only had <10 user-visible pages in our part of the service, so I didn’t have to worry about that.
  • ave_b_2011 2y ago
    I really like this - because technology is for everyone but can end up being harder to use because of design decisions. Thanks for sharing this.
  • nicbou 2y ago
    This is important to do, in my opinion. You should not assume that non-English-speaking users all understand a little bit of English. It also confers some SEO benefits. That being said, if the URL has a language code (/en/), it would be good to change the language code manually, and still end up on the right page. Sometimes the language switcher is really well hidden. However a visible language switcher is even better.
  • simonw 2y ago
    That’s classy.
• palijer 2y ago
  I gotta say, Datadog does this pretty well. They manage all their state (just information state, not like user sessions lol) in the URL, which makes it easy to integrate with and dynamically generate links and share information, and manages to stay human readable.
• unglaublich 2y ago
  I like that GitHub supports file-like suffixes to get different views of the same content. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/{hash} https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/{hash} https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/{hash}.patch https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/{hash}.patch https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/{hash}.diff https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/{hash}.diff
  • syspec 2y ago
    I agree that is a cool feature. I would say it's from its Rails background where such a thing is encouraged (.json or .html (or no extension)) on a resource give you two different outputs
  • keepamovin 2y ago
    I'm also a fan of the public keys extension: https://github.com/${username}.keys https://github.com/${username}.keys
• mrweasel 2y ago
  The Slack URL scheme, and a few others mentioned in other comments take me right back to hp.com/go/<Insert Product>, so hp.com/go/proliant would take you to Proliant servers, maybe. The idea was really cool, but from talking to people at HP at the time, the implementation was apparently a complete nightmare done with an insane number of rewrites. It was sort of a hit and miss if the thing you typed in after /go/ would actually take you to the correct location, if any.
  • anamexis 2y ago
    How was the implementation hard? It seems like it would be a bog-standard set of redirect rules.
    • mrweasel 2y ago
      It was the shear amount of them that was the problem. Plus this was in the early 2000s and they where, if I recall the story correctly, manually managed.
• cynicalpeace 2y ago
  I've come to regret that most of my projects have this URL design- mainly because it gets harder to track via third party analytics platforms like Sentry and Clarity. eg. series/9876545678 and series/098767890 get treated differently and the analytics get difficult to merge. But really they're the same page just hydrated with different data. Should've used query params, eg series?id=9876545678
• amadeuspagel 2y ago
  I think the URL design of stackoverflow leavs room for improvement. The id should not be necessary. StackOverflow demands unique questions. If a question doesn't have a unique slug, is the question unique? Great URL design to me is if the slug is suffficient for uniqueness, without an id.
  • arccy 2y ago
    you should be able to refine question titles
• robertclaus 2y ago
  From a URL=Resource perspective I don't love unstructured strings in the url because they make it trickier (never impossible) to extend with sub-resources. For example, if I have a url for a blog post with a slug, it's more difficult to represent a comment as a sub-record of that post: `my.domain/post/123/my-great-slug-that-is-pretty-long-but-doesnt-matter/comment/456` vs `my.domain/post/123/comment/456`
• jimniels 2y ago
  Post author here. There are so many great additional examples of intriguing URL patterns in the comments here. TY everyone for sharing ones you remember!
• velcrovan 2y ago
  I like the slack.com/is/ scheme that makes the resource into a simple, legible phrase. I do something similar on my site: everything in the "projects" category has a URL that starts with "what-about", e.g.: https://joeldueck.com/what-about/splitflap/ https://joeldueck.com/what-about/splitflap/
• moondev 2y ago
  When you want to "go run" but all you have is curl and a prayer https://goblin.run https://goblin.run
• raldi 2y ago
  I always liked that you can prepend reddit.com/ or redd.it/ to any URL (http and all) and get taken to a prefilled submit page for it.
• tracker1 2y ago
  Note, if you are using optional slugs or otherwise, you should have a canonical url in the header so that search results will be collated to a single canonical url.
• hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
  Unfortunately these practices are biased to the English language, as slugs are limited to ASCII.
• dbg31415 2y ago
  Just remember to build localization into your URLs. mysite.com/en-us/some-page mysite.com/en-ca/some-page You can 301 redirect some locale to your "base" URL if you want. mysite.com/en-us/some-page > mysite.com/some-page But don't stress too much. Google doesn't really care about URL content any more. People on phones don't care what your URL says. It's at most desktop users, and devs. Don't stress localizing your URLs... mysite.com/fr-ca/some-page is just as good as mysite.com/fr-ca/une-page... and the former is a lot easier to tie into email marketing variables. Just keep your sitemaps in the localized folder. mysite.com/sitemap.xml... just a link to the various localized sitemaps. mysite.com/en-us/sitemap.xml etc. By keeping sitemaps in a localized folder, it'll make it a lot easier for yourself as you go to register your site with each market's locale. If you just have to localize URLs... consider doing what Amazon does and just tie the URL to an ID. https://www.amazon.com/Moen-One-Handle-Bathroom-Deckplate-84771BZG/dp/B0CFYPTKF8 https://www.amazon.com/Moen-One-Handle-Bathroom-Deckplate-84... the above is the same as this... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFYPTKF8 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFYPTKF8 And you can put anything you want in the URL string, it just matches on the ID. https://www.amazon.com/literally-whatever-you-want-here/dp/B0CFYPTKF8 https://www.amazon.com/literally-whatever-you-want-here/dp/B... “We use the words in a URL as a very very lightweight factor. And from what I recall this is primarily something that we would take into account when we haven’t had access to the content yet… [but] as soon as we’ve crawled and indexed the content there then we have a lot more information. And then that’s something where essentially if the URL is in German or in Japanese or in English it’s pretty much the same thing.” - John Mueller, Google Search Advocate.
• 65 2y ago
  How about great email address design? Of course firstname@lastname.com is top tier. But there are some interesting hacks you can do, such as firstn@melastname.com if your last name domain isn't available.
  • mbb70 2y ago
    I never thought of this! I have an 'a' in my first name but just checked, 'rest of my first name + last name'.com is already taken. Oh well, I already have 'my initials'.dev, it'll have to do.
  • WickyNilliams 2y ago
    Not sure it counts but mine is wicky(AT)nillia(DOT)ms. Which aligns with my username practically everywhere, and is a spoonerism of my actual name. The downside is that it's a massive pain to explain to people verbally!
• pyinstallwoes 2y ago
  Everything should be accessible via the identity of its composition (a hash or equivalent). Then all the data needed to render it be computed or downloaded from some peered cache (DHT).
  • MrThoughtful 2y ago
    So when you bookmark the Hacker News frontpage, that would be a hash of its current content and then you will visit that stale stale version forever and never see any new stories?
    • pyinstallwoes 2y ago
      a version of it lives forever. You can associate siblings/changesets based on hash linking. https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hypertext%20Documents.html#tumblers-and-humbers https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy... Something like Xanadu tumblers.
• hartator 2y ago
  > website under a .is domain (which is for Iceland, apparently). I don’t super like repurposing country names like that. Including .io. It feels this disregards the actual meaning of the extension while ignoring some very legal consequences to be under Indian legal system instead of EU or US.
  • Liquix 2y ago
    To be fair most countries rolling out ccTLDs these days aren't doing it so patriotic citizens can represent their home country - it's an international cash grab. They're fine with randoms from all over the world giving them money, so randoms from all over the world are welcome to use their ccTLDs.
• Sephr 2y ago
  Another interesting related area is designing URLs for third-party components. Third-party component have to coexist with existing site navigation logic, so generally you can't safely add URL-based configuration to such a component. Fortunately, configuration can now be stored in fragment directives in order to hide this from normal site routing. e.g. https://example.com/page#routing-info:~:additional-routing-info-for-third-party-component With fragment directives, location.href and location.hash exclude the additional content in the hash after :~: This is used in Transcend Consent Management for configuring parameters to debug and simulate various privacy experiences[1]. 1. https://docs.transcend.io/docs/consent-management/reference/debugging-and-testing#config-overrides https://docs.transcend.io/docs/consent-management/reference/...
• simonw 2y ago
  I’m glad this article mentions GitHub, who have had some of the best URL design I’ve ever seen, and have done since they first launched. I use that ALL the time. I can navigate straight to any issue by typing a URL. I can switch to the “actions” view for a repo by adding /actions. I can see the file I’m looking at in a branch by editing the URL and swapping “main” for the branch name. All available via the UI as well, but I interact with GitHub so often that the tiny efficiency boost I get from navigating by URLs really starts to add up. I also trust them not to break links, based on their track record. My notes and blog posts and even my source code are full of links to issues or code snippets on GitHub.
  • c-hendricks 2y ago
    do these routes on github irk anyone else: /issues/ /issues/:id /pulls/ /pull/:id
    • heinrich5991 2y ago
      Even worse: /issues/ /issues/:id /pulls/ /pulls/:author /pull/:id
    • simonw 2y ago
      Yes! I really wish they would at least set up /pulls/:id to redirect to /pull/:id
  • berkes 2y ago
    I believe this is a (happy) legacy from Rails. In rails, if you don't spend effort to undo, you get URLs that match your database setup in a RESTful way. For me, that's far to tight coupling, and problematic in other ways. But the result is that without thinking about it, without a second of time spent on designing an URL structure, you get a very nice, consistent and clean one for free.
• acjohnson55 2y ago
  It was cool to see Jessica Hische called out. We own a couple of her children's books. Always fun when my parenting and tech worlds collide in surprising ways.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• nullhole 2y ago
  The Reuters links are an example of good links IMHO. They're not earth-shattering, and follow some fairly generic guidelines, but work quite well. Format is reuters.com/:category/:headline:date which is all you need to know what you're clicking on. For example, I don't need to describe this link in order for its contents - and its time-relevance - to be understood: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-navys-newest-air-to-air-missile-could-tilt-balance-south-china-sea-2024-08-14/ Edit: they are a bit long, though, I suppose
• efortis 2y ago
  I used my.lan for my local net I changed it to home.arpa, but I forgot why
• quickgist 2y ago
  One of my favorite blogs for "sentence URLs" is https://there.oughta.be https://there.oughta.be The projects formatted like: https://there.oughta.be/a/wifi-game-boy-cartridge https://there.oughta.be/a/wifi-game-boy-cartridge