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I’ve banned query strings

chrismorgan.info

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Re: I’ve banned query strings

#171

Post by chrismorgan »

wodenokoto wrote: post #154

So my understanding is, he is annoyed that other website adds a query string such as "?ref=origin.com" to links pointing to authors website. How does this benefit the other website? How does this hurt the authors website? I am completely confused about the behavior of both side here. I get that when I run an ad-campaing I want google to add a utm-query string, so I can track which campaign users arrived from - but th…

I’m broadly anti-tracking: it’s generally against the interests of the individual.

Query string additions are commonly used to track things. You can see that lots of people don’t want that by the existence of Firefox features like “copy clean link” and Extended Tracking Protection which proactively strips some like UTM parameters.

Some sites happily participate in what I will glibly call the tracking economy. They may benefit because the recipient will see in their logs that lots of people are coming from their site, and do something that helps their site because of that.

My rejecting query strings is a simple form of protest against that system.

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#172

Post by 0x62 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #154

So my understanding is, he is annoyed that other website adds a query string such as "?ref=origin.com" to links pointing to authors website. How does this benefit the other website? How does this hurt the authors website? I am completely confused about the behavior of both side here. I get that when I run an ad-campaing I want google to add a utm-query string, so I can track which campaign users arrived from - but th…

It's marketing for the origin site. The line of thought is that the author sees significant traffic from xyz.com in the ref query string, and considers advertising or partnering with the origin site.

Honestly, it is quite useful for niche/startup sites. I have been on both ends of conversations that began from seeing these in web analytics (as someone that saw incoming traffic from a site and reached out, and as someone that received contact from a site I linked to) - and both times it ended in a mutually beneficial partnership.

I can understand the privacy argument to some degree, but it provides no more information than the standard Referer header (and if you use analytics like Simple Analytics/Plausible, it is a lot more visible).

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#173

Post by chrismorgan »

ollien wrote: post #37
jampekka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You could argue that I’m abusing 414 URI Too Long. I respond that it’s funnier this way. Other options I considered were: 400 Bad Request, the generic client error code, which is correct but boring; 402 Payment Required, and honestly if you want to pay me to make a particular URL with query string work, I’m open to it; 404 Not Found, but it’s too likely to have side effects, and it doesn’t convey the idea that the r…

I don't think it's an abuse, RFC9110 defines 414 as a response for "refusing to service the request because the target URI is longer than the server is willing to interpret". Since adding a query string involves only adding characters, this seems fine; there's no stipulation as far as I can tell that all pages a server hosts must adhere to the same length. I'd be curious if any well-known clients interpret it that wa…

I reckon it is still an abuse. I am willing to interpret longer target URIs… so long as they don’t contain a question mark. /no-query-strings is longer than /?.

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#174

Post by [deleted] »

wodenokoto wrote: post #154

So my understanding is, he is annoyed that other website adds a query string such as "?ref=origin.com" to links pointing to authors website. How does this benefit the other website? How does this hurt the authors website? I am completely confused about the behavior of both side here. I get that when I run an ad-campaing I want google to add a utm-query string, so I can track which campaign users arrived from - but th…

[deleted]

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#175

Post by kittikitti »

hamdingers wrote: post #60

While I don't take the author's hard stance, I do hate gratuitous query params that result in links that are thousands of characters long. I use this bookmarklet to strip query params before sharing a link: javascript:(()=>navigator.clipboard.writeText(location.origin+location.pathname))();

This is great! I love one-liners that are readable like this. This made me wonder if there are any extensions that run a script on every page load for a web browser. I'm currently experimenting with userscript managers and plan on including your code as an additional security measure against tracking.

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#176

Post by deepsun »

altairprime wrote: post #133
gritzko wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, GitHub URIs are a good example of overusing paths: https://github.com/gritzko/beagle/blob/a7e17290a39250092055f... - user gritzko, - project beagle, - view blob, - commit a7e17290a39250092055fcda5ae7015868dabdb4, - file path VERBS.md ... all concatenated indiscriminately.

That’s not an indiscriminate hierarchy. Grouping data by user is common and normal in computing: /home laid precedent decades ago. Project directories are an extremely common grouping within a user’s work sets. Yeah, some of us just dump random files in $HOME, but this is still a sensible tier two path component. The choice to make ‘view metadata-wrapped content in browser HTML output’ the default rather than ‘view r…

But the path misses param names (or types?). E.g who said the hex-encoded part is a commit hash? Maybe it's a tree hash, or just weird ref.

Query strings are more verbose as force to give each param a name.

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#177

Post by chrismorgan »

Aardwolf wrote: post #38

> You could argue that I’m abusing 414 URI Too Long. I respond that it’s funnier this way. Other options I considered were: Another option to consider is "418 I'm a teapot": teapots usually also don't support query strings

But I’m not a teapot. I despise tea.

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#178

Post by chrismorgan »

humodz wrote: post #23

The tone of this and Chris's post gives me the impression that it's harmful to include these query parameters, but I don't understand how. Could someone elucidate me? I understand it can mangle some URLs and that's good enough reason not do it, but even then it seems like a minor incovenience.

Three angles:

The technical purist: you’re modifying a URL in a way that, while in line with accepted custom, is technically incorrect. URLs should (the least effective type of should) basically be treated as opaque.

Social: it’s tracking stuff, sibling comment trees are good, I won’t reiterate.

Clutter: it’s getting in the way of the bit you should care about, and contributing to normal people no longer caring about URLs because they’re too hard, too complex.

Re: I’ve banned query strings

#180

Post by chrismorgan »

llimllib wrote: post #166

> curl, for example, seems to illegitimately strip a trailing question mark (could be only for the command line, didn’t test library usage). umm what? I don't know what they're actually sending where they think this, but if you think curl is broken you should re-think that maybe you're the one doing something wrong. Here are some examples showing curl not stripping question marks (obviously), I am very curious what t…

  $ curl -s 'https://httpbingo.org/get?' | jq .url
  "https://httpbingo.org/get"
This may require further investigation.
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