SANITIZE ALL THE SERVER CONTENTS!
Probably the worst URL scheme ever
81–90 of 106 posts
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I can't imagine the skill required to do this without the experience to know it's a bad idea" (can't find the source for this quote, but you should get the sentiment). ...ahhh... found it: """"How do you attain the skills required to do this while not also learning not to?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4711355 """
The way you end up with URL's like http://www.tsa.gov/TSA-Pre✓™ is a CMS system that replaces spaces with dashes in the title to make the URL. No skill required.
Glad to see they finally fixed that with a redirect to a sane url.
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
§ 1353 of the BGB (German Civil Code) can be found at http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__1353.html (literally ‘laws on the internet’).
So close, with minimal effort they could map that to '/bgb/1353'. It seems that dejure.org actually works that way -> http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/1353 seems to map to http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/1353.html , but they graciously ignore any kind of file extension...
Well they already managed to get an overview/full-text at /bgb/, so I am quite happy for now…
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#84Not sure what it is but the URLs on the japanese BVB site look better: http://www.bvb.jp/
What the heck, this site is reasonable, attractive, and legible, why is this not the MAIN SITE?!?
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#85I still think the one used by the Spanish Congress is worse. URL for legal document 162/000609: http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/...
Legal portals are generally gasbage, here's the french one for Article L511-1 of the environmental code: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticle...
Legal portals are also many times vulnerable to a form of directory traversal, where you descend the URL scheme by cropping out the last slash. ie. /documents/17683/ would become /documents/. Doing the same thing for parameters can do wonders.
So far I've found login portals to a few banks, teleoperators and to the parliament and military systems of my country. In addition, I've hit several FTP directories of organizations such as my state's public welfare system, which included software and documents.
I sometimes report these incodents as I find them, anonymously and without contact information, since nobody never responds to these reports.
tldr; Long urls can also be dangerous.
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#86I think THOMAS ( http://thomas.loc.gov/ ), the search engine provided by the US Library of Congress for searching federal legislation, has the worst URLs I've seen. Here's a random one: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d113:1:./temp/~bdGqLa:@@@T|/home/LegislativeData.php| And here's a link I got to the Patriot Act (HR 3162): http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c107:44:./temp/~c107DgA33R::
Making sense of that in linear time would be a great interview question.
The ./temp/~c107DgA33R bit looks like a reference to a cached internal state of the system, so you can probably make about as much sense of it as you can of https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=H1QJE8EOaO2OkA28owXZ4H.
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#87I think THOMAS ( http://thomas.loc.gov/ ), the search engine provided by the US Library of Congress for searching federal legislation, has the worst URLs I've seen. Here's a random one: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d113:1:./temp/~bdGqLa:@@@T|/home/LegislativeData.php| And here's a link I got to the Patriot Act (HR 3162): http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c107:44:./temp/~c107DgA33R::
Note that these are not even canonical URLs. Both of them now fail with a "Search Timed Out" error.
US Trademark Office has the same issue, there is no way to link to a particular trademark, because the only access is via the search engine and queries time out, e.g.: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:xt...
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why HN has such a peculiar URL for accessing pages. It times out after a while too, is that to stop crawlers?
They are ids to lookup closures in a database. They time out to stop the database overflowing ;) It's called continuation-based web development [1], popular with Lisp and Smalltalk-based web servers (because who else has continuations?) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation#In_Web_development
Oh, wow. I had assumed that people who visited around the same time got the same next page URL, maybe as part of a caching strategy or something.
This way seems impractical, TBH. Certainly for the user - the expiration a bit of a nuisance, as I'll get it more often than not if I read a couple of stories and then click 'More'.
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#89LinkedIn URLs are by far the worst. For example, the first profile that came up when I searched for Paul Graham: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23081590&authTyp...
You can have a public URL for linkedin in the format /in/CustomName E.g.:www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama
Too bad that seems like only an external reference method, and the site never uses those URLs internally.
Re: Probably the worst URL scheme ever
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
hahaha :D Let's put the tech sensation aside. I'm glad to know that the HN Folk have a good sense of humor :) BTW: you can add multiple routes pointing to the same url, but allow only the SEO URLs to be indexed. This keeps the cryptic URLs for the entertainment of the Users/Crawlers.
How would you do this? (Leaving aside the question of 'why?') I suppose you could try blocking crawlers from the raw URLs with an aggressive robots.txt and then put a sitemap (with friendly/SEO URLs in) somewhere for them to discover instead. Would that work? Paranoid web spiders could flag the site as suspicious, though. Such schemes might make it seem like the website is presenting one view to the spider, and anoth…
My understanding is that you can use e.g. "rel=canonical" links to tell bots what the indexable URL of the current page is. Other tools in the box include UA sniffing and sitemap.xml.