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URLs are state containers

alfy.blog

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Re: URLs are state containers

#181

Post by agos »

franciscop wrote: post #156

This is one of the things that bothered me the most from existing React libraries, if you wanted to update a single query parameter now you needed to do a lot of extra work. It bothered me so much I ended up making a library around this [1], where you can do just: // /some/path?name=Francisco const [name, setName] = useQuery("name"); console.log(name); // Francisco setName('whatever'); Here's a bit more complex examp…

that's a quite common pain. Both nuqs and Tanstack Router come to mind as libraries which put some thought in making it a bit better

Re: URLs are state containers

#183

Post by jaza »

noctune wrote: post #168
padolsey wrote: post #8

I agree, and this reminds me: I really wish there was better URL (and DNS) literacy amongst the mainstream 'digitally literate'. It would help reduce risk of phishing attacks, allow people to observe and control state meaningful to their experience (e.g. knowing what the '?t=_' does in youtube), trimming of personal info like tracking params (e.g. utm_) before sharing, understanding https/padlock doesn't mean trusted…

It doesn't help that URLs are badly designed. It's a mix of left- and rightmost significant notation, so the most significant part is in the middle of the URL and hard to spot for someone non-technical. Really we should be going to com.ycombinator.news/item?id=45789474 instead.

That's how it was in the good ol Usenet days! Eg alt.tv.simpsons. Not sure how URLs ended up being the other way round.

Re: URLs are state containers

#184

Post by liampulles »

You are still thinking of the web as being a hyperlinked collection of information serving the betterment of human knowledge, rather than a set of SPAs where you through trial and error try and get whatever AI enabled product you are now forced to use to do what you ask.

Re: URLs are state containers

#185

Post by mexicocitinluez »

liampulles wrote: post #184

You are still thinking of the web as being a hyperlinked collection of information serving the betterment of human knowledge, rather than a set of SPAs where you through trial and error try and get whatever AI enabled product you are now forced to use to do what you ask.

Nothing of what you said has anything to do with storing state in the URL.

Re: URLs are state containers

#186

Post by latexr »

jorl17 wrote: post #24

When I get my way reviewing a codebase, I make sure that as much state as possible is saved in a URL, sometimes (though rarely) down to the scroll position. I genuinely don't understand why people don't get more upset over hitting refresh on a webpage and ending up in a significantly different place. It's mind-boggling and actually insulting as a user. Or grabbing a URL and sending to another person, only to find out…

> I genuinely don't understand why people don't get more upset over hitting refresh on a webpage and ending up in a significantly different place. It's mind-boggling and actually insulting as a user. Or grabbing a URL and sending to another person, only to find out it doesn't make sense.

I do dislike those cases. But I also dislike being two-thirds through a video or page, thinking “I’ve got to share this with , it’s right up their alley”, then hitting my fast combination of keys to share a URL and realising the link shared my exact place, which will make the person think I’m sharing a snippet and not the whole thing, so now I need to send another message to clarify.

I like being able to have URLs reproduce a specific state, but I also want that to be a specific decision and not something I can share or save to a bookmark by mistake.

Re: URLs are state containers

#188

Post by zwnow »

jorl17 wrote: post #24

When I get my way reviewing a codebase, I make sure that as much state as possible is saved in a URL, sometimes (though rarely) down to the scroll position. I genuinely don't understand why people don't get more upset over hitting refresh on a webpage and ending up in a significantly different place. It's mind-boggling and actually insulting as a user. Or grabbing a URL and sending to another person, only to find out…

I hate sharing links that are like 2 pages long in Whatsapp. Simple as that. If I hit refresh on a page I do it for a reason and I expect to be set at the start of the page. Its no big deal to scroll to where I was. Bloated URLs are a pain to work with too. I highly prefer clean short links. Just store state in local storage and recover it if necessary. If the user has js disabled its kinda their issue state isnt persisted.

Re: URLs are state containers

#189

Post by loloquwowndueo »

sehugg wrote: post #34
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #9

The amount of state that early video games stored in like 256 bytes of ram was actually quite impressive. I bet with some creativity one could do similarly for a web app. Just don’t use gzipped b64-encoded json as your in-url state store!

My 8-bit IDE lets you share your ROM as a lzg/b64-encoded URL. Things get dicey when you go above 2000 characters or so.

URL please :)
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