undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmatt_kantor10y ago0 comments

HN has subpar URLs (in terms of UX), but they're still very useful. I can copy the bytes "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770774" and use them to get back to this comment thread later from any device with a web browser. I can give these bytes to a friend to refer them to this thread. I can share these bytes publicly and have a reasonable expectation that they'll allow anyone to retrieve the content on this page (not forever, but the Internet Archive and other caches have your back if this URL breaks in the future).

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open-source-ux10y ago· 1 in thread

Making the HN URLs more human readable would also make them much longer. However, the longer URLs could provide a form of site structure if the URLs are 'editable' e.g.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/2016/05/25/regressive-web-apps

Then, if you edit the URL, you can get all stories for today:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/2016/05/25/

All stories for the month (which would require pagination):

  https://news.ycombinator.com/2016/05/

And all stories for 2016:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/2016/

And finally, back to the home page

  https://news.ycombinator.com/

Note: all these pages don't have to be explictly linked or displayed on Hacker News, they might appear only when someone edits the URL in their browser.

Edit: Just to add...here's a lengthy, but very detailed post by an ex-BBC employee about using URLs to model the complex data for BBC programmes

Designing a URL structure for BBC programmes http://smethur.st/posts/176135860

matt_kantorOP10y ago

Definitely! URLs that have meaningful structure (like your examples) are awesome because in addition to shareability they also offer discoverability without needing extra out-of-band information. As you say users can guess ahead of time what content they'll land on when editing structured URLs.

But that's a feature that unfortunately we can't assume every website will provide (it would be great if we could!). My point was that even opaque/meaningless URLs are incredibly useful to humans.

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