Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996) • Hacker News Board

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#31

Post by edoceo » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:06 AM UTC

namegulf wrote: post #7

Semicolon is also nice on the eyes compared to '&' we're used to today. Why in the world this didn't gain traction?

Browser and server and language defaults. Back in the CGI-BIN days there were loads of apps using "exotic" options in the URL. IMO when ASP3 and PHP3 were popular (I was there Gandalf!) the world started to normalize around '&'

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#32

Post by xg15 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:08 AM UTC

Titan2189 wrote: post #28

Whenever the article mentions 'pause', it means 'parse', right?!

Wondered about that as well. There are a few more word errors like this one, so I guess the text was captured using early dictation/speech recognition software?

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#33

Post by xg15 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:12 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #24

This is completely redundant w.r.t. URL parameters: ?foo=bar&etc=whatever ... There is no need to have two competing keyword-value-list (KVL) formats in the same context.

Wasn't the matrix proposal earlier (or in parallel) to the query string one? Or did they have different intended meanings from the start?

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#34

Post by xg15 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:16 AM UTC

The cool thing is, there is so little "ossification surface" in URLs that this proposal could still be implemented today. The only thing not natively supported by browsers is the relative URL syntax, but even that could be added by some JavaScript or server-side rewrites if desired.

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#35

Post by Klaster_1 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

ljnelson wrote: post #13

Many comments so far seem to imply (perhaps not intentionally) that this syntax was intended only on the "right side" of the URI, but you can think of it more as adding qualifier-like information to (potentially) each path segment. So in /com/foo/bar you could further qualify foo (perhaps as /com/foo;color=yellow/bar). This can be combined with a (definitionally trailing) query string as well. Someone noted that Spri…

That's how I use matrix params in one of my Angular projects - these are very handy to put segment filter params into instead of query params. When you have parallel routes (page/dialog) and filtering everywhere, URLs stay much easier to reason about.