Examples of Great URL Design (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: Examples of Great URL Design (2023)

#161

Post by kijin » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 6:15 AM UTC

Sharparam wrote: post #91

kijin wrote: post #30

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 charact…

> 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.

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.

Re: Examples of Great URL Design (2023)

#162

Post by qmmmur » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 9:16 AM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #72

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.

What was it like working for gov uk?

Re: Examples of Great URL Design (2023)

#163

Post by robin_reala » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 1:58 PM UTC

qmmmur wrote: post #162

robin_reala wrote: post #72

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.

What was it like working for gov uk?

Best time of my professional career, broadly (although there were obvious frustrations). I’d 100% recommend at least a couple-year stint at GDS if it’s an option, as it completely changes the way you think about a huge number of things.