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>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-sta
by 3form 5mo ago
>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name
If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part.
It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness factor.
- Chaosvex 5mo agoDefinitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.
- robertlagrant 5mo agoIt happened, but not as often as you'd think. In 2017 I was arguing with someone that the back button should work and URLs should be obvious in a fairly large project and they said "people are used to the back button not working - like a bank website".
- fl4regun 5mo agoi've seen people argue about how the back button should work this year on HN
- Izkata 5mo agoPath parameters has nothing to do with history replacement breaking the back button, did you mean to respond to someone else?
- robertlagrant 5mo agoThat was the "URLs should be obvious" bit - sorry, it was a bit buried.
- echelon 5mo agoGitHub was one of the first popular places to 1. not use query params for key entities in the URL 2. to stick user identifiers at the root path! totally unheard of to occupy such an important path at that point! Taken together, this was entirely novel. Next to nobody did this. Twitter was the one other notable example, and that's literally all I can think of. The URL bar was so different back then. It wasn't search by default. The average tech savviness of internet users was higher. People cared about URLs despite the fact most websites had garbage cgi-bin query string slop. Lots of folks had personal domain names. People typed URLs and shared them a lot - so this was a big deal, because they were memorable, unlike the other slop URLs at the time. To give more character - HN's urls would have been considered exceptionally nice back then. The average URL was way worse and was littered with hundreds of query parameters. A great deal of websites put your session token in the query params. PHP had first class ways of spending "sessions" to all urls. Essentially a cookie. It was disgusting. GitHub revolutionized urls as a product. Even today, not many companies followed suit. They're still the gold standard.
- wredcoll 5mo agoReddit did it, linked in, most social media really, this is all just a throwback to /~user/ paths from apache and other early webservers. I think slashdot used the same convention.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- 3form 5mo agoReddit doesn't have users at top level (point 2 of the parent post). This is I think a very distinctive factor, at least at that time.
- ImPostingOnHN 5mo agoTop level would be your name is the tld. 2nd level would be yourname.com. 3rd level would be yourname.site.com, like LiveJournal and Blogspot had a long time ago. 4th level would be site.com/yourname, like Myspace had a long time ago, and Facebook had after that, and Github had after that. Once you sink all the way down to the obscure depths of 4th level, there's not much difference between site.com/yourname and site.com/whatever/yourname
- bluedino 5mo agoThat was just a byproduct of how Rails did routing based on the URL