URL Pet Peeves
April 23, 2007
One of the best features of Django is the clean URL structure. The following is an example of what could be avoided with clean URLs.
When I go to my bank’s website I usually type in ‘uboc.com’ and hit enter. I always spare the ‘www’ for any site unless it doesn’t work without it. ‘www’ is unnecessary anymore.
When I enter that url, I am redirected to:
https://www.uboc.com/uboc/home/home.html
The redundancy drives me absolutely mad! Two instances of ‘uboc’, plus unnecessary bits ‘www’, ‘.html’, and two instances of ‘home’. I want to slap someone. This ugly URL should be:
https://uboc.com/
That’s it. There is no reason for the redundancy or ‘home’ (twice!), ‘www’, or ‘.html’. Going to the root of the URL should imply that you’re at the ‘home’ of the site, that’s it.
This is one of my ridiculous pet peeves.
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Comments
Not ridiculous, there is good reason for having sensible URLs.
Posted by Chris Rose
I don't know, there are decent arguments for the "www".
And 90% of the time, bad urls are the result of crappy shrinkwrapped software they bought from someone else.
Posted by Joel Bernstein
I'm not sure what more of the argument pro-www is other than it explicitly identifies a web-specific node in a domain. I don't buy it since the whole DNS thing has been hacked and worked around for the web since the beginning.
My case is that if you must explicitly label 'www' then shouldn't we explicitly display or force the port number as well? A request coming from a browser has a lot of implied behavior.
Though I'd love to read up more on the pros for 'www' if anyone has any links!
Posted by SuperJared
Argument for using www: http://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/6/s...
Basically, it lets you set cookies that won't be available to every other subdomain.
Posted by Simon Willison
I also had to add www for cookies across subdomains, otherwise they wouldn't work.
Posted by Carol
Simon & Carol, thanks, that makes sense -- something I hadn't considered nor have yet come across.
Posted by SuperJared
Another argument for www is communication:
Everybody associates www.example.com with a web address while example.com is ambiguous.
www is such a clear sign for web addresses that http:// is often dropped in offline communication such as posters, letter heads phone calls and so on.
Posted by Mitja