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How to store your app's entire state in the url

scottantipa.com

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Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#171

Post by PUSH_AX »

munk-a wrote: post #157
PUSH_AX wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious to hear why you are so shocked. Long, ugly, user unfriendly urls are really prevalent. Arguments can be made even query params are pretty ugly.. Are urls expected to be a good UX these days? What's the big deal?

Just because a thing is prevalent doesn't mean it's good. I have a hard time believing all those parameters are completely necessary for the amount of data being displayed. Often times it feels like people just base64encode(page.state) and call it a day. I think it's advantageous to keep the complexity and specificity of information in URLs to a minimum outside of what's needed to retrieve the data set as it can make…

> Just because a thing is prevalent doesn't mean it's good.

I agree with this sentiment. I'm not sure I've ever seen a url referred to as "good", I was just a bit confused as to why someone would baulk at a URL. In my opinion everything after the host portion of the url is to serve the apps needs, so it knows where to go or what to do, it's not really an interface for the user as obviously there are better ways to present that.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#172

Post by Ndymium »

saghm wrote: post #161

I imagine I'm not the first one to think of this, but a little while back I wrote a toy pastebin-like webpage that stored the code being rendered directly in the URL (with base64 and gzip compression to make it a bit smaller, although it still was quite large by usual standards). My thinking was that rather than having a centralized app for this publicly available, making a small page that could be statically hosted…

Great minds think alike? I just posted about my URL-using pastebin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315577

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#173

Post by werdnapk »

cwt137 wrote: post #131

A few years ago, I worked on an app where some of the state was kept in the session and some was on the url as GET params. We ran into an issue where some browsers would only accept urls that were less than 1024 chars long. Is that still an issue today?

Yes. I had a bug report last year to deal with this due to the url being cut off in the browser with Ajax GET requests. I converted to a POST request which has no length limitations.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#174

Post by secondcoming »

orasis wrote: post #122
divbzero wrote: post #86

App state in URL can be a good idea, but if possible I prefer readable path/query parameters instead of unreadable base64 encoding. As one comparison, this is Google Finance encoding stock chart parameters: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/F:NYSE?window=5Y Versus Yahoo! Finance doing the same: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/chart?p=F#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsiLCJwZXJpb2RpY2l0eSI6MSwidGltZVVuaXQiOm51bGwsImNhbmRsZ…

Another reason to not base64 encode is that many URLs with base64 strings will break in iMessage do to strings randomly matching various keywords that iMessage looks for. I think ‘usd’ is one such substring to look out for.

Surely that's something that Apple should fix, rather than everyone else working around it?

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#176

Post by voidmain0001 »

divbzero wrote: post #86

App state in URL can be a good idea, but if possible I prefer readable path/query parameters instead of unreadable base64 encoding. As one comparison, this is Google Finance encoding stock chart parameters: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/F:NYSE?window=5Y Versus Yahoo! Finance doing the same: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/chart?p=F#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsiLCJwZXJpb2RpY2l0eSI6MSwidGltZVVuaXQiOm51bGwsImNhbmRsZ…

Pass that super duper long Yahoo URL to Tinyurl and shrink it down to https://tinyurl.com/bdfepwar

It seems like storing state in the URL could benefit from URL shortening techniques so long as the secret sauce logic is both client and server side.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#177

Post by stnmtn »

voidmain0001 wrote: post #176
divbzero wrote: post #86

App state in URL can be a good idea, but if possible I prefer readable path/query parameters instead of unreadable base64 encoding. As one comparison, this is Google Finance encoding stock chart parameters: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/F:NYSE?window=5Y Versus Yahoo! Finance doing the same: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/chart?p=F#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsiLCJwZXJpb2RpY2l0eSI6MSwidGltZVVuaXQiOm51bGwsImNhbmRsZ…

Pass that super duper long Yahoo URL to Tinyurl and shrink it down to https://tinyurl.com/bdfepwar It seems like storing state in the URL could benefit from URL shortening techniques so long as the secret sauce logic is both client and server side.

This loses all the benefits of storing all state in the url, which is that it's inspectable by the client. Using a URL shortener still makes all the data stored somewhere in the server

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#178

Post by escot »

escot wrote: post #40
redleader55 wrote: post #7

A better idea is to use the URI fragment (the string after the # sign). It has the advantage of not having a size limit, and not needing to be sent all to the backend during the request. `window.location.hash` is your friend.

This is a great point, but also depends on what browsers you want to support. In my experience some browsers a) will truncate the url when you try to copy it from the browser bar (safari), and b) will not support any url including the hash past a certain cut off (like the SO comment states).

I just updated knotend to use the hashmark, see my comment above!

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#179

Post by holdenk »

I did something similar using Racket's (nee PLT scheme) web programming module ( https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/hosc07-sk-mf.pdf ) back with an app that got on slashdot -- https://github.com/holdenk/web2.0collage

The theory was wonderful (yay! stateless load balancer etc.) but in practice browsers at the time were less than happy with trying to store that much state in the URL.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#180

Post by threeseed »

This technique goes back to the late 90s where Apple WebObjects (owned by NeXT at the time) pioneered this approach in their web framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects

Was quite revolutionary at the time and it also included the first (or one of the very earliest at least) SQL ORMs.

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