Alvaro Carrasco wrote:
I'm not against pretty urls, I have done them before because *I* think
they're cool and they go well with the concepts of REST, but I would
argue that right about 0% of non-developer humans actually care what
urls look like. It's more of a cool thing for developers to do, than the
usability booster people make it out to be.
I disagree. Try telling someone in-person, or over the phone the URL
An exaggerated example that is in no way fair...
http://www.example.com/index.php?action=viewPage&page=products
"The website is h, t, t, p, colon, slash, slash, w, w, w, dot, example,
dot, com, slash, index, dot, p, h, p, question mark, action, equals
sign, view, capital p, a, g, e, ampersand (hold shift and push 7), page,
equals sign, products"
or almost as bad
"The website is h, t, t, p, colon, slash, slash, w, w, w, dot, example,
dot, com. Then click on the blue menu across the top that says Products"
VS
http://example.com/products
"The website is example, dot, com, slash, products"
This is the most obvious benefit of clean URLs, but there are other
examples, such as: printing a URL on a printed ad, shorter URLs (no need
for tinyurl.com), etc. Lots of non-developer humans would like clean URLs.
Now for the discussion about Google. Google *will* index links with GET
parameters. However, using clear keywords in the URL itself will make
your site rank more highly than the keywords only appearing in the GET
params, or worse, not in the URL at all.
--lonnie
P.S. I know my examples were partially cheating due to the inclusion of
http://www. It is a small pet peeve of mine. http:// should be obvious
and should never be repeated over the phone or in person if the other
party understands web site. And www. should be deprecated. Your
website should either return the same pages when the root domain is
accessed, or at least redirect to the www.example.com.
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