Experiments in URL design.

Keeping url structure sane plays a major role in user experience, by making it easy to go to specific pages and navigate the site. Some real world urls and how they could have been better follow.

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The Bad Urls:

• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967820
• http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=99
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa336522.aspx

The Good

• Easy to develop for. The id referred is the Primary key

The Bad

• Hard for users to select the correct page from a url bar dropdown
• Bad for SEO

Neutral:

• Easy to guess next and previous pages.

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The fairly good Urls.

• http://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/efh2v/djangoeasymaps_app_that_makes_it_easy_to_display/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4352854/jquery-handle-keypress-for-list

The Good

• Includes title in the url which makes it easy to select in browser dropdown and history.
• Good for SEO.

The Bad

• Includes redundant info in Urls, which make it unnecessarily long.
• Urls are not unique. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4352854/anything will work.

What I would like

• http://stackoverflow.com/jquery-handle-keypress-for-list
• http://www.reddit.com/djangoeasymaps_app_that_makes_it_easy_to_display/

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The almost good urls.

• http://www.linkedin.com/in/shabda/
• http://www.reddit.com/r/india
• http://www.reddit.com/user/shabda/

The Good

• Short
• Includes only important info in the url.

Cons

• Quite good, but still includes some unneeded info.

What I would like

• http://www.linkedin.com/shabda/
• http://www.reddit.com/india
• http://www.reddit.com/u/shabda/

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The prefect urls.

• https://github.com/Spacelog
• https://github.com/facebook/tornado
• http://twitter.com/#!/shabda
• http://twitter.com/#!/shabda/kiddos
• http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds-android-1-million-advertising/
• https://mail.google.com/a/agiliq.com/#starred/12c84752671e87c3
• http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html

The Good

• No unneeded info is included in the urls.
• Each part of the url can be removed to get the logical page for it. Eg. 0 1, 2, 3[http://code.google.com/]

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Suggestion

Make urls case insensitive

• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967820
• http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=99

Work.

• http://news.ycombinator.com/Item?id=1967820
• http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/Viewforum.php?f=99

Do not work. (We changed capitalization.)

While

All of these work.

• http://twitter.com/#!/shabda
• http://twitter.com/#!/Shabda
• https://github.com/Facebook/tornado
• https://github.com/facebook/tornado