2019/Düsseldorf/urls
URLs How? was a session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2019.
Watch: ▶️41:03s
Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/urls
IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2019
Session: URLs How?
When: 2019-05-11 11:30
Structuring URLs, future proof, aggregation,
Participants
- Sonniesedge.net
- Webgefrickel.de
Sebastiaan Andeweg
Rosemary Orchard
Jeremy Keith
Tantek Çelik- DanielPietzsch.com
Martijn van der Ven – remote
Greg McVerry remote- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Background
Notes
- Charlie shows her current URL design:
- /notes
- /notes/123
- /posts
- /posts/some-pretty-url
- Should /note/123 go to /notes/123? What should load on /bookmarks/123 when 123 is only an ID for a note?
- Has different content types for different concepts.
- wants a page to show different things together in one place. How do you call that?
- ... add notes
Examples
GitHub's blog post URLs are human readable, but not memorable, e.g.
- (Charlie showed one that she had bookmarked)
Hackability
- /things
- /things/ID
- /things/ID/otherthings
- /things/ID/otherthings/ID
E.g.
- Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tollwerk/45698290631/in/album-72157703142292825/
- shows whos photos, photo ID, but also in which album the view is
more notes
- feels like there is a difference between elements in a path and things in the query string
- things in the path feel like you have to keep available always
- things in the query string could be temporal / ephemeral
uppercase vs lowercase
- Martijn van der Ven’s URL is case-sensitive, because it uses a path.
- Charlie’s URLs are case-insensitive. /Bookmarks will rewrite to /bookmarks.
URLs as part of the UI
- How much control does a CMS give you over the URLs?
- We are all designers of the experience, we should be designing URLs.
How people use URLs
- People put URLs in the Google Search field, and expect the first hit to be the thing they want to visit.
- So do people actually “hack” URLs? Do they understand them?
- Do people even see URLs? Mobile browsers will only show the domain, some browsers (Safari) have started doing this on the desktop.
- Omnibar may have made a difference here too: previously browsers had separate fields for URLs and search. Writing a search term in the URL bar would not have worked, automatically informing people more about URLs.
Migrating URLs
- Charlie kept all the URLs when going from Craft CMS to Drupal
- If IDs are in the URL, and the IDs can stay the same, it is often easy to change non-ID parts of the URL (e.g. categories) and still have the CMS redirect automatically.
- On Template:seblog the slug is not part of the unique URL for a post, so the slug can changed or removed.
- His URLs are also hackable, drop parts from the end and you go back to posts that day, month, year.
- Posts are stored as YEAR/ORDINAL/ID.
- 5eb.nl/4zt2 – number of days since epoch, encoded in newbase60: 4zt, and the ID of the post that day: 2.