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URLs matter

8th November 2002

Jeremy Zawodny talks about URLs, and describes a recent internal Yahoo discussion over how the URLs for their stock tickers should work. His points in favour of short, simple URLs are particularly worth noting:

  • Short URLs mail better. They don’t wrap and break.
  • Short URLs are easy to read over the phone.
  • Short URLs can be memorized when used often enough.
  • Guessable URLs keep the hackers and geeks happy without affecting the 99.9% of normal users at all.

With benefits like that, I just don’t understand why so many sites (especially those running a CMS costing hundreds of thousands of pounds) continue to use hideously long and illogical URLs.

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This is URLs matter by Simon Willison, posted on 8th November 2002.

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Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/11/08/urlsMatter