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by shellac 2303 days ago
> In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee created three things, giving birth to what we consider the Internet. The HTTP protocol, HTML, and the URL.

What we call the web, surely? I appreciate we conflate the two, but in this context I think that's what was meant.

And it's really the URL (URI, IRI, URN...) that makes the web. An amazing thing.
2 comments
klenwell 2303 days ago
Agreed. I consider the URL the most important part of a web page's user interface.

I get incredibly frustrated with websites (e.g. many SPAs or frontend-happy sites) that don't provide a URL that I can bookmark and share where it obviously makes sense to do so.

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tannhaeuser 2303 days ago
> And it's really the URL (URI, IRI, URN...) that makes the web.

Well Chrome devs seem to disagree, with the recent push to hide URLs, and so do SPA devs. Is the article meant to save the URL, or rather a fairwell? Anyway, URLs aren't particularly well-designed IMO, for their use of the ampersand char as separator in the query part alone, since these conflict with ampersand as used for starting entity references in HTML and other SGML docs.

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thenewnewguy 2303 days ago
> and so do SPA devs

??? - those usually use the URL bar in my experience.

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vanadium 2303 days ago
In most SPAs, however, URLs aren't used like conventional URLs; they're treated as routes. I think that's more the point here.

They aren't conventionally "shareable", first off, which violates more or less the spirit of what a URL is supposed to represent on the Web.

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scrollaway 2303 days ago
This is pretty much untrue. Gmail is an SPA for example, and I can share "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#spam" with you, or "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwGDWqXKSSfXBDQ... (of course you can't access the latter because you don't have the appropriate permissions for it … but point still stands: I can open that URL in a new tab and it'll open the same email).

I've written plenty of SPAs myself that use the URL and you couldn't actually tell it's an SPA unless you have the technical experience to know what to look for.

If what you're saying is "this infinite-scrolling page sucks at respecting URLs", that's something else, and it's not specific to SPAs. Infinite scrolling predates SPAs (Here is one for jQuery! https://infinite-scroll.com/#initialize-with-jquery), and doesn't have to break URLs if you don't write your code like an uncivilized brute.

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cc81 2303 days ago
Breaking the back button and not using propers URLs are two cardinal sins in SPA development.
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