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URLs are UI

hanselman.com

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Re: URLs are UI

#81

Post by xyzxyz998 »

wav-part wrote: post #80
morecoffee wrote: post #7

Which of the following URLS are clearer? 1a. https://foo.com/ 1b. https://www.foo.com/ 2a. https://foo.com/search/products/couches/color/red 2b. https://foo.com/search?products=couches&color=red 3a. /posts?recent 3b. /posts?recent= 3c. /posts?recent=true 4a. /post/1234/products-couches-furniture-red-cheap-recent-ikea-tags 4b. /post/1234/ I can think of good reasons for picking each of these, and even good reasons for…

I think this is more user friendly. https://foo.com/search?products=couches;color=red;show_recent;

Wow it does feel so much more readable than using an ampersand. I'd still prefer an ampersand because it plays well everywhere and the kind of people who'd look at url and try to understand would be too ingrained to ampersand anyway.

Re: URLs are UI

#82

Post by captbaritone »

romwell wrote: post #38
captbaritone wrote: post #11

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/

Brilliant! http://urlme.me/simply/one_can't_simply/fix_the_web ..but your example might lead the way. Also, I hope this stays up for a long time to come.

If you are at all worried about it going away, you can add:

    ?host=imgur
To the URL and it will 301 to the image hosted on Imgur. That is assuming you have more faith in the longevity of Imgur than you do in the longevity of my side project :D

Re: URLs are UI

#83

Post by nameequalsmain »

a3n wrote: post #31

> I love Stack Overflow's URLs. Here's an example: https://stackoverflow.com/users/6380/scott-hanselman > The only thing that matters there is the 6380. Try it https://stackoverflow.com/users/6380 or https://stackoverflow.com/users/6380/fancy-pants also works. SO will even support this! http://stackoverflow.com/u/6380 . This works too: https://stackoverflow.com/users/6380/a3n That doesn't seem right, and on a differe…

I use the same scheme for blog posts on a website I develop. I solve this problem by looking at the slug and redirecting to the correct one if it is wrong.

Re: URLs are UI

#85

Post by amptorn »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #59
amptorn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problem here is that now I can make you appear to say anything I want you to say. http://urlme.me/success/I,%20captbaritone/lick%20goats.jpg This can get much nastier fast.

You mean without that website you wouldn't know how to put some random text on an image?

No, I can force you to host words and it looks like you said them.

Re: URLs are UI

#86

Post by irl_ »

wodenokoto wrote: post #35
irl_ wrote: post #30

URLs are addresses. For web, we messed up and URLs became part of the UI. It shouldn't be necessary to use URLs in most cases though. e.g. imagine using IMAP URLs to read your email.

Man, I'd love to be able to link to individual emails from my calendar. Having entries like the following in my calendar app would be amazing: "Company event on , for details see linked email"

If we remembered there was more to the "web" than HTTP, this would be a thing.

I remember Tim had a diagram that showed "links" between all different systems, all addressable by URI/URL.

Re: URLs are UI

#87

Post by simias »

kqr wrote: post #72
simias wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a "slug", it's extremely common and IMO a good thing. Sure, you can create a weird looking or even misleading URLs that way but I don't think it's a big problem because 1/ as soon as the page load the URL gets rewritten to the real title and 2/ it's often very easy to obfuscate links regardless of that. Many platforms allow you to hide your links behind an href with some markup for instance, so you can make bo…

> You can't even trust the browser's link preview tooltip because it can be overridden in JS. What!? Just tooltip, or status bar also?

I'm talking about the "preview" usually at the bottom left of the browser when you hover a link. By using a Javascript event handler on the link you can override what happens.

Google does that for instance, if you hover on top of a search result it'll look like a direct like to the website, however if you look at the HTML source it looks something like this:

    test - Wiktionary
So even though the href goes to wikipedia in this case if I click the link the browser goes to a google page that then redirects me.

You can see the real URL by right-clicking on the link and then hovering again, it causes the "onmousedown" code to run and replace the href by the real value.

Duckduckgo uses a "click" event handler instead. As far as I can't tell Bing doesn't do anything and directly links the target website, which is odd. I may be missing something.

Re: URLs are UI

#88

Post by combatentropy »

guscost wrote: post #65

This 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,…

Insisting that a URL change with state is taking it too far. It's not how I understood what Tim Berners-Lee and others were saying at the beginning. I would be interested, however, in articles that espouse this.

If the URL represented state, then it should change as you're filling out an HTML form, at each keystroke. But instead there is one URL for the blank form and one after you click Submit.

A better rule is one URL per "document" or "record." So in your Photoshop example, there would be a different URL per file that you edit (www.photoshop.com/image001.psd) but not per edit. Well, if the app saved versions, then you could append ?v=203. But in general I think it's enough to align URLs to "documents" (like a news story) or "records" (like a particular profile in a contact database).

Re: URLs are UI

#89

Post by DanBC »

kmfrk wrote: post #66
DanBC wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Weird, that doesn't happen for me.

http://imgur.com/a/2auu0

Re: URLs are UI

#90

Post by eridius »

amptorn wrote: post #85
monsieurbanana wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean without that website you wouldn't know how to put some random text on an image?

No, I can force you to host words and it looks like you said them.

It's a meme generator. Nobody's going to believe that the person who operates the site "said" anything on there.

Next are you going to upload an image to imgur that "looks like" the creator of imgur is saying something bad?

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