The death of clean URLs

[citizenc]

Check out the following list of links. One group of them makes me angry, the other does not. Try to guess which is which.

Group A:http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/AP_Obama_formally_wins_most_Texas_delegatesRead more... )

Comments

LiveJournal: Not-quite-epic fail

[citizenc]

The URL for this post is http://citizenc.livejournal.com/779319.html

LiveJournal post URLs merely give you the username of the poster. No date, no time, and not the title of the page. Why can't it be like this:

http://citizenc.livejournal.com/2008/04/02/the-death-of-clean-urls.html

That link won't work. I only wish it did.

LiveJournal = fail.

Re: LiveJournal: Not-quite-epic fail

[imaginecreate]

It's one thing about livejournal I wish was different. It is nice to have URLs that are human readable. At the very least, a better system like TinyURL would be nice if it could integrate and provide such a thing.

Re: LiveJournal: Not-quite-epic fail

[citizenc]

TinyURL provides a preview service:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3cdsng

But that's hardly a substitute :S

[citizenc]

Shhhh :P

[khayman]

I get your point, however I think that content is better managed by machines than people. If you index your pages via a database system and assign them a random or sequential key value and rename the page as such you're going to have better storage overall. Then you can leverage the database functionality for searching/indexing of the actual content.

[citizenc]

I agree. But those unique identifiers don't need to be exposed to the users. It doesn't mean anything, only serving to obscure the destination. :S

[khayman]

Well yeah, because if you're going to rename the html file as such to keep the uniqueness. Granted your date-based approach would probably help to keep them separate but you still run the risk of an author or two authors posting the same document for the same day.

[citizenc]

Ok... so how about this:

http://UNIQUEID.mywebsite.com/2008/04/02/the-death-of-clean-urls.html

I'd be in heaven if YouTube URLs looked like this:

http://tTHJtI_FLz4.youtube.com/the-legend-of-zelda-movie-trailer

Instead, I have to use this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTHJtI_FLz4

[alphagroove]

i think its the lack of trust on the internet nowadays.. or laziness

Actual title for link page