Lonnie Olson wrote:
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.
That's a good point about the phone. Although I don't think I have ever
had to tell somebody a complete url over the phone, it usually goes
like: go to examples.com and click on products, or I just send them an
email or write a url on a piece of paper. So, I would assume that
spelling out a url over the phone does not happen very often.
Alvaro
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