141–150 of 218 posts
I'm not certain that I agree with this because a URL makes no claims about idempotency or side-effects or many other behaviors that we take for granted when building systems. While it is possible to construct such a system, URLs do not guarantee this. I think the fundamental issue here is that semantics matter and URLs in isolation don't make strong enough guarantees about them. I'm all for elegant URL design but the…
Yes It does. HTTP PUT is idempotent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One example I think is super interesting is the NWS Radar site, https://radar.weather.gov/ If you go there, that's the URL you get. However, if you do anything with the map, your URL changes to something like https://radar.weather.gov/?settings=v1_eyJhZ2VuZGEiOnsiaWQiO... Which, if you take the base64 encoded string, strip off the control characters, pad it out to a valid base64 string, you get "eyJhZ2VuZGEiOnsiaWQiO…
Sorry but this is legitimately a terrible way to encode this data. The number 0.8 is encoded as base64 encoded ascii decimals. The bits 1 and 0 similarly. URLs should not be long for many reasons, like sharing and preventing them from being cut off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a viable solution, but as the article mentions, you lose intent and readability (e.g. seeing a query parameter for “product=laptop” vs. “state=XBE4eHgU”). And in general, it’s unlikely you’ll run into issues with URL length. Two to eight thousand characters is a lot!
I remember bouncing into this limit once in a project because we wanted to make a deeply customized interface shareable without a backend, and while on the site itself we didn't hit a URL limit, when someone shared it via some email clients it added it's own tracking redirect onto the URL which caused it to hit the limit and break.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty weird, my impression is that the APIs are flexible enough to implement most sane behaviors, but websites keep managing to mess it all up. Perhaps it's just one of those things that no one bothers re-testing as the codebase changes.
Nothing weird about it, you see people arguing right here whether a site should add a new history entry when a filter is set. Interacting with the URL from JS within the page load cycle is inherently complex. For what it's worth, I'd also argue that the right behavior here is to replace . But that of course also means that now the URL on the history stack for this particular view will always have the filter in it (as…
I would have one state for when the user first entered the page, and then the first time they modify a filter, add a 2nd state. From thereon, keep updating/replacing that state.
This way if the user clicks into the page, and modifies a dozen things they can
1. Refresh and keep all their filters, or share with a friend 2. Press back to basically clear all their filters (get back to the initial state of the page) 3. Only 1 more press of back to get back to where-ever they came from
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with JS, if it is classical synchronous JS it is much better than the modern blind push for async JS, which causes the browser to try to restore the position before the JS has actually created the content.
isn't there a way to instruct the browser to restore the position only after certain async thing?
Recommendation: https://github.com/Nanonid/rison Super old but still a very functional library for saving state as JSON in the URL, but without all the usual JSON clutter. I first saw it used in Elastic's Kibana. I used it on a fancy internal React dashboard project around 2016, and it worked like a charm. Sample: http://example.com/service?query=q:'*',start:10,count:10
Thank you!! There’s a tone of projects where I’ve wanted something like that. I’ve previously cobbling together something ad hoc myself but this looks way more thought out and (slightly) more standard than me making up my own thing.
[0]: https://github.com/persvr/rql
[1]: https://github.com/jirutka/rsql-parser
[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-nottingham-atomp...
"Braid’s goal is to extend HTTP from a state transfer protocol to a state sync protocol, in order to do away with custom sync protocols and make state across the web more interoperable.
Braid puts the power of operational transforms and CRDTs on the web, improving network performance and enabling natively p2p, collaboratively-editable, local-first web applications." [4]
[1] A Synchronous Web of State:
[2] Braid: Synchronization for HTTP (88 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40480016
[3] Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful (564 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507076
[4] Braid HTTP:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but this is legitimately a terrible way to encode this data. The number 0.8 is encoded as base64 encoded ascii decimals. The bits 1 and 0 similarly. URLs should not be long for many reasons, like sharing and preventing them from being cut off.
The “cut off” thing is generally legacy thinking, the web has moved on and you can reliably put a lot of data in the URI… https://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maxim...
First, I think it's a fact that the average user does not consider a URL to be a state container. The fact that developers in this thread lament the "new school" React developers who don't use the URL as a state container is proof of this. If it follows that a React developer, no matter how inexperienced, is at least as knowledgeable if not more about URLs than the average person, if they don't even consider the URL to be a valid container for state than neither does the average person.
Putting state in the URL breaks a fundamental expectation of the user that refreshing a page resets its state. If I put a page into an unwanted state, or god forbid there is a bug that places it in an impossible state, I expect a refresh of the page to reset the state back. Putting state in the URL violates this principle.
Secondly, putting state in a URL breaks the expectation of the user for sharing locations. When I receive Youtube links from friends, half of the time the "t" parameter is set to somewhere in the video and I don't know if my friend explicitly wanted to provide a timestamp. The general user has no idea what ?t=294833289 means in a URL. It would be better to store that state somewhere else and have the user explicitly create a link a timestamp parameter if the desired outcome was to link to an explicit point in the video. As it stands now, when I send YouTube links to friends I have to remember to clear the ?=t parameter before sharing. This is not good UX.
There are other reasons why I think its a bad idea but I don't want this comment to be too long.
That doesn't mean not to use search parameters though. Consider a page for a t-shirt, with options for color and size. This is a valid use case for putting the color and size in the URL because it's a location property - the resource for a blue XL shirt is different from a red SM shirt, and that should be reflected in the URL.
That's not to say that state should never be put in the URL - in some cases it makes sense. But that's a judgement call that the developer should make by considering what behaviour the user expects, and how the link will most likely be used. For a trivial example, it's unlikely that a user wants to share their scroll position or if a dropdown is open when sharing a page. But they probably want to share the location they've navigated to on a map, as it's unlikely they're sharing a link to `maps.google.com` with others (although debatably that's not state, but rather a location property).
I'm going to provide a dissenting opinion here. I think the URL is for location , not state. I believe that using the URL as a state container leads to unexpected and unwanted behaviour. First, I think it's a fact that the average user does not consider a URL to be a state container. The fact that developers in this thread lament the "new school" React developers who don't use the URL as a state container is proof of…