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by _query 2039 days ago
Thanks for your thoughts!

> why in the world are the controller paths capitalized

The idea behind that is that it makes mapping from url to action easier when trying to understand how things work.

E.g. `/Posts` maps to `PostsAction`. `/NewUser` maps to `NewUserAction`.

I think longterm urls don't matter that much anymore as many browsers just hide them completly (think Safari, many mobile browsers, etc.), so we optimize them for development purposes :)

(Disclaimer: Founder of digitally induced, the company behind IHP)

4 comments

Please let's not help with the efforts to hide the URL by spreading this sentiment. It's a misguided move that will only make users more helpless and the web more mysterious for them.

I'm increasingly encountering users that have trouble understanding that they should copy the URL to someone if they want to share a web page with them. Humans are logical creatures: if they see a part of the system that is constant, they will deduce that it could not have had an impact on the part that is changing. In the case of the URL this is an incorrect conclusion, but the UX from bad actors like Apple and Google is steering the user towards it.

If the intent is to show the host more prominently, then the URL should be visually split into the (more prominent) host part and the path part. The path part should not be simply hidden.

I disagree with that perspective.

So far, hyperlinks have not gone away.

But which style of concatenation of words is surely subjective. I would have thought that FooBar -> foo-bar was the ad-hoc standard, but even then, people handle corner cases differently, such as “what if the word you’re url-ifying contains a dash?”

I consider this 'an opinion to get started quickly', it's easy to change if you wish ;-)
not a good idea to leak implementation details in the url/interface. think about facebook with all those .php urls.
Another reason why urls (still) matter: SEO.