I’ve been working on this for a while, but let’s make it official: I started a little Tumblr-like microblog about software craft and quality!

[mwichary@mastodon.online]

@svenni Oh, yes! I always found it a bit awkward.

[mwichary@mastodon.online]

In which I celebrate the craft of Flickr’s original, amazing URL scheme: https://unsung.aresluna.org/unsung-heroes-flickrs-urls-scheme/

[davebauerart@mastodon.social]

@mwichary I remember when this was the norm! It was everywhere for a lot of the web sites I was involved with in the olden days. I have always done URL surgery. Probably comes from comfort with command-line interfaces and knowing how the backend software works.

[atomicbird@mastodon.social]

@mwichary that was the first web API I ever used. I didn’t appreciate it nearly enough until I used others.

[gosha@merveilles.town]

@mwichary Yes! Flickr was what made me pay attention to URLs as well. The thing I thought was a bit strange at the time is how the URL for the profile page was at a separate "root" path, `/people/mwichary`, which made the profile and photostream feel like two separate apps in a way. I remember wondering about that a lot!

[dokas@mas.to]

@mwichary Immediate internal share!

[mwichary@mastodon.online]

@gosha Oh yeah! I forgot about that.

[devils_rancher@beige.party]

@mwichary I was taught that human-readable URLs were important, took it to heart, and now everything just makes me sad to look at the ridiculous strings. Flickr has really hung in there in a lot of ways, and I’m still very happy with the service.

[mez@mastodon.nz]

@mwichary Regarding the note about adding a human friendly slug to the end of a URL, do you have a thought or preference to putting that part before the unique id?

flickr.com/mwichary/sets/alishan-forest-railway-72177720330077904

On an app I run I went with that style so the all the human readable bits could be typed and autocompleted. It does seem to be a little harder to read since it’s in the middle of the text though.

For example: https://app.mythic.nz/book/public-storybooks/sharable-public-storybooks/v4dUmg8Jjk6LmQYQlqy6Pw

`public-storybooks` is the collection slug, and `sharable-public-storybooks` is the page title slug.

[dokas@mas.to]

@mwichary @gosha I can assure you it’s a perennial quandary. The truth is the origin of this particular pattern harkens back to the Game Never Ending era.

[dokas@mas.to]

@gosha @mwichary I can’t cite anything specific (too long ago, and before my time) but in the beginning when things were more amorphous it wasn’t entirely certainly that photos would be the whole show. “Social networks” were just beginning, and even Flickr let you list your favorite books, movies, etc back then. Setting up /people/ probably made sense for a lot of possible things to come.

[gosha@merveilles.town]

@dokas @mwichary Thank you, that does make sense! It's very interesting to learn about how things/formats we now take for granted evolved and were solidified back then.

[drmikepj@mastodon.social]

@mwichary call me a middle-aged codger but I still type urls by hand and wince slightly when people put a site’s name into google rather than just typing whateveritis.com

[doekman@mastodon.nl]

@mwichary True to that. Reminds me I always wondered why no API documentation existed on Dropbox/Google Drive/Nextcloud URL’s. I had to reverse engineer them. Apparently API's should be REST…

[sylvhem@eldritch.cafe]

@mwichary It makes me happy to see that others care about URL.

[mwichary@mastodon.online]

@Ember Yeah, I agree that part is a bit muddy where every scheme has pros and cons. This one seems to indicate there is more hierarchy than there actually is…

[mwichary@mastodon.online]

@mez Good question. I don’t know! I naturally put it at the front but that might be because I only saw it that way. Interesting point about autocomplete!

[csilverman@mastodon.social]

@mwichary The idea of URLs as user interface elements is such a good take. I've seen some people use URLs as design/communications elements as well, like Jessica Hische:

https://www.jessicahische.is/thinkingthoughts

https://www.jessicahische.is/working

https://jessicahische.is/anoversharer

I love that approach. Modern browsers and preview cards often obscure URLs, but people still see these things; printed materials, links in emails, etc.

[nelson@tech.lgbt]

@mwichary this clean URI scheme is also why FlickrClient.py could support 68 methods of the Flickr API in just 48 lines of code. The core magic:

def __getattr__(self, method):
  def method(_self=self, _method=method, **params):
    _method = _method.replace("_", ".")
    url = HOST + PATH + "?method=%s&%s&api_key=%s" %
          (_method, urlencode(params), self.api_key)
    try: rsp = xmltramp.load(url)
    except: return None
    return _self._parseResponse(rsp)

[polarbirke@indieweb.social]

@mwichary Much agreement!

There is plenty of prior art, some examples that I particularly remember:
- 2010: https://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/
- 2017: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/urls-are-ui
- 2018: https://alexpounds.com/blog/2018/12/29/four-cool-urls