131–140 of 157 posts
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It's kinda funny you mention that Google will kill the url. For at least the past decade, advertisement in Japan has been showing people which search term to enter to find the website instead of a url.
I can't tell if that's a worse idea than QR codes of URLs.
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> Machines, on the other hand, hate ambiguity and context. When I ask my car to call my wife using only her first name, it suggests a list of 3 people who I'm not even sure how they got in my contacts list. Siri, on the other hand, gets it right every time with the exact same request. I wouldn't say my car hates ambiguity, the programmers failed to bridge the gap to human/machine interaction and meet the person halfw…
that’s funny. i have the exact inverse problem. when i ask siri to call my wife ( by her first name only ) it gives me a list of two to pick from, whereas my car does the opposite and calls my wife. darn computers!
The root of the issue here is that URLs are trying to be human-meaningful and machine-meaningful at the same time, but those requirements are fundamentally incompatible. Humans work well with ambiguity and context. You know that when your coworker says "Bob's birthday is this weekend" you know she means her husband Bob, not Bob from accounting who nobody likes. And you even prefer that system to having an unambiguous…
Usernames and filenames are not just compromises, nor arbitrary sequences of characters. Usernames reflect a fundamental human desire to create an alter ego free from the burden of their legal name and the socioeconomic context they're in. If Samual Clemens were a blogger, he would write under the username @marktwain. Alonso Quixano might call himself @donquixote69. Anakin Skywalker will want to be known (and feared)…
This is the point that I think is completely lost on the author of the article, probably because of a focus on API design. It's a good thing that we can replace that dog-eared copy of Moby Dick with a shiny new one when the time comes, and our users don't need to change their URLs.
APIs are intended to be used primarily by machines, so it's fine for the URL structure to preference the predictable uniqueness of ids. However, for most URLs intended for use by humans, the forces are different.
A human-readable URL is not a pointer, it's a symlink.
The root of the issue here is that URLs are trying to be human-meaningful and machine-meaningful at the same time, but those requirements are fundamentally incompatible. Humans work well with ambiguity and context. You know that when your coworker says "Bob's birthday is this weekend" you know she means her husband Bob, not Bob from accounting who nobody likes. And you even prefer that system to having an unambiguous…
"Humans work well with ambiguity and context" Not so sure about the "well" part there. I've encountered people who love to make guesses about the context (and others who actually wish you'd do the same). That coupled with ambiguity creates disasters varying from ordering the wrong lunch to broken relationships. I'd rather have humans take less pride in being ambiguous and make attempts to be as precise as possible.
So there's this whole ambiguity aversion spectrum. Maybe it correlates to the autism spectrum, maybe it doesn't. It's arguably much more important. Even in mathematics you have Poincaré, a demigod among men that kept publishing papers with significant mistakes, while in the social sciences you have people like Niklas Luhmann and Bruno Latour who approach their subjects with utmost precision and dedication to detail.
I'm a more ambiguous, big-picture-even-in-small-problems thinker; and I thrive with more detail-oriented coworkers that walk me through the trees as I walk them through the forest. This has a lot to do with me being able to think in very ambiguous terms and narrow down as needed to interact or provide for the needs of others. Left to my own devices I come up with extremely abstract philosophical theories that are not useful at all! Conversely left to their own devices precision people become paperclip optimizers.
I want to speculate further into "edgy" territory: maybe the whole gender divide that seems to come up in psychometrics and the labor market and so on is really an ambiguity/precision divide. The evolution of technology has actually increased the value of ambiguity, as computers do much of the precision work for us -- maybe making tech "woman-friendly" is rather about identifying those big-picture/detail-oriented complementarities.
Good advice. Interesting that Canonical URLs aren't mentioned. But the sheer arrogance of serving a webpage that doesn't render any text unless you execute their JavaScript really annoys me. It's not a fancy interactive web-app, it's a webpage with some text on it.
The notion of surfing the web without JavaScript enabled is increasingly antiquated. You can't even log into Google without JS enabled; it's necessary to mandate it because of iframe attacks.
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You don't necessarily have to redirect, but you should at least include ` ` (as given example StackOverflow does) so that search robots and other website (scrape and/or API) clients know which one is the canonical path, to avoid duplicate efforts.
That only works for some crawlers. Certainly not for users. Meanwhile, everything obeys redirects. Since you bring up Stack Overflow, notice that they do the canonical redirect. Change the title in the URL and you'll get redirected.
Great post - I quite like the stackoverflow.com style of `stackoverflow.com/questions/ / `, where can be changed to anything, and the link still works. This allows for easy URL readability, while also having a unique ID. In the context of this post (the library example) that would look like library.com/books/1as03jf08e/Moby-Dick/
Doing this means that: 1) there are now an infinite number of URLs for every one of your pages that may end up separately stored on various services (mitigated for only some kinds of service if you redirect to correct), 2) if the title changes the URLs distributed are now permanently wrong as they stored part of the content (and if you redirect to correct, can lead to temporary loops due to caches), 3) the URL is now…
Not all services allow you to change the title (and therefore mutate the slug) but situations where changing the title changes the slug are so infrequent (and in this case, consequences nearly so inconsequential) that this is a problem mostly in theory. It's a miniscule price to pay for semantically useful URLs.
The root of the issue here is that URLs are trying to be human-meaningful and machine-meaningful at the same time, but those requirements are fundamentally incompatible. Humans work well with ambiguity and context. You know that when your coworker says "Bob's birthday is this weekend" you know she means her husband Bob, not Bob from accounting who nobody likes. And you even prefer that system to having an unambiguous…
It's kinda funny you mention that Google will kill the url. For at least the past decade, advertisement in Japan has been showing people which search term to enter to find the website instead of a url.