I made a little project taking this idea to an extreme. The idea was, that you should be able to generate "meme" image macros simply by typing a URL. That way you could create memes on the fly anywhere that you can enter a URL (Slack/Twitter/Facebook/etc.) without having to leave the app. Just type a URL of the form: http://urlme.me/ / / . http://urlme.me/
http://urlme.me/epiphany/URLs/Are_UI.jpg
URLs are UI
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: URLs are UI
#62I made a little project taking this idea to an extreme. The idea was, that you should be able to generate "meme" image macros simply by typing a URL. That way you could create memes on the fly anywhere that you can enter a URL (Slack/Twitter/Facebook/etc.) without having to leave the app. Just type a URL of the form: http://urlme.me/ / / . http://urlme.me/
And this is why URLs as input don't work:
http://urlme.me/philosoraptor/what%20if%20urls%20were%20actu...?
Where's my question mark? ;)
Nice idea and nice execution though, too bad the contraints work against it.
EDIT: Aaaaaand the UI broke on HN too!
Re: URLs are UI
#63I made a little project taking this idea to an extreme. The idea was, that you should be able to generate "meme" image macros simply by typing a URL. That way you could create memes on the fly anywhere that you can enter a URL (Slack/Twitter/Facebook/etc.) without having to leave the app. Just type a URL of the form: http://urlme.me/ / / . http://urlme.me/
And this is why URLs as input don't work: http://urlme.me/philosoraptor/what%20if%20urls%20were%20actu... ? Where's my question mark? ;) Nice idea and nice execution though, too bad the contraints work against it. EDIT: Aaaaaand the UI broke on HN too!
http://urlme.me/philosoraptor/what%20if%20urls%20were%20actu...
FTFY.
But yeah, having to url encode stuff is annoying
Re: URLs are UI
#64See also the pit of despair known as SharePoint. example.com/sites/MySite/MyList.aspx can be functionally the same as example.com/sites/MySite/MyList.aspx?GUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUID=GUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUID&GUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUID=GUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUID&GUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUID=GUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUID&GUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUIDGUID=GUIDGU…
This is a pet peeve of mine. I'm writing some vuejs SPAs and I am using nuxtjs for server side rendering (probably a clone of react's nextjs) and when appropriate, using the URL for reproducible "what you are currently looking at" state as much as reasonably possible. It's too disappointing these days how apps don't let you middle click open a link to a new tab, destroy your original URL when rewriting navigation history to redirect you to login, etc.
Re: URLs are UI
#65This is all solid advice, but there's something that still bothers me about URLs:
From one side I hear that hypertext should be the engine of application state. This implies that the URL router should control just about everything, and that you should be able to click a link in an email and jump directly to any state of your application. From the other side I hear that web apps can be just as capable as desktop apps, and it's only a matter of time before we'll be using PhotoshopJS in a browser.
What isn't said is that Photoshop has no concept of an "address bar", and it probably will never have one. As with so many things, the best practices for a blog or message board might be completely different from the best practices for a creative application. Could you design a URL format to represent the state of a Photoshop editing session? Would you even want to?
Something's gotta give.
Re: URLs are UI
#66I hate that people use shorturls on Twitter, especially news sites with paywalls. I check the full URL of articles in my Twitter client before I click them, especially when people share the links without any description. Since Twitter gives all links the same allotment of characters, it's really frustrating that people insist on sticking to shorturls. Goes to show how tracking and advertising keeps ruining the Web.
> Since Twitter gives all links the same allotment of characters Does it? The documentation I've read doesn't suggest this, unless you're including Twitter's own wrapping of links with its own shortURL t.co
When I type in a URL, the character counter doesn't go down as I extend the URL. So there is no upside to doing it for me.
Re: URLs are UI
#67I made a little project taking this idea to an extreme. The idea was, that you should be able to generate "meme" image macros simply by typing a URL. That way you could create memes on the fly anywhere that you can enter a URL (Slack/Twitter/Facebook/etc.) without having to leave the app. Just type a URL of the form: http://urlme.me/ / / . http://urlme.me/
Facebook's Phabricator software has this exactly built in, but I think it's a relatively little known feature.
The only difference is that you need to upload a selection of base images and assign shortnames to them, instead of entering a general search phrase.
Re: URLs are UI
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1a. https://foo.com/ > 1b. https://www.foo.com/ www for old folks, non www for all the rest. > 2a. https://foo.com/search/products/couches/color/red > 2b. https://foo.com/search?products=couches&color=red https://foo.com/search?products=couches&color=red Those are parameters, not a path. The first one has only value as an SEO optimization. > 3a. /posts?recent > 3b. /posts?recent= > 3c. /posts?recent=true /posts/rec…
I disagree with 2a. No reason why this shouldn't be a path that the user can edit to go one level "up" to /search/product/couches. That's kind of the point of the article - these are parameters for the programmer , but are UI to the user. Separating parameters by "&", except for the first KVP which is separated by "?" from the URL is not intuitive. On the other hands, they path editing is familiar.
Products aren't hierarchially ordered first by type, then by colour, then by material, etc. These are all attributes that have multiple possible orderings (or no order at all).
Of course, if the site is designed such that it forces you to pick those attributes in a specific order, that URL scheme would make sense (but that would be a poor design for other reasons).
Re: URLs are UI
#69This is all solid advice, but there's something that still bothers me about URLs: From one side I hear that hypertext should be the engine of application state. This implies that the URL router should control just about everything, and that you should be able to click a link in an email and jump directly to any state of your application. From the other side I hear that web apps can be just as capable as desktop apps,…
If you're using non-destructive editing a URL might indeed be helpful for sharing the progress and evolution of a file with others. Something like photoshop.app/jdavis703/file/oceanview.psd/layer/colorcorrect might be really useful.
Re: URLs are UI
#70I agree with the article, and I really don't understand how Google Search can be so bad with URLs. Seems they get more and more paramenters every time I look, to the point my browser (Safari) hides the URL just for them.
I switched to DuckDuckGo, but for a while I had a browser extension that would fix Google URLs for me. Recently I added another one for Twitter links.