This is completely irrational, I know, but I hate looking at GUID's in URL's. It's kind of rare, but now and then you come across a link that uses them and it's annoying. It's a huge pet peeve of mine. Look, I'm sure your CMS is wonderful and I'm sure you have a perfectly valid reason for using them. I know they are important for RSS and, to be perfectly honest, I like the way they look when they aren't in a URL. However, the URL to your content is quite visible and people actually do look at them before clicking.
In a world where web servers and CMS's are easily configured to make descriptive and pretty content-based URL's, I don't think there is a reason for showing ugly GUID's in them. Take a look at this nonsense:
http://www.gameinformer.com/NR/exeres/35f37ce3-21e4-4c2f-8e44-f59fce45f511.htm
http://www.dhhs.state.sc.us/dhhsnew/NR/exeres/ED990B6B-CA67-4B83-9600-DD1832A180DA.asp
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=6203178D-C782-42E2-8D56-765A3D7EDCD7
More that use whatever CMS makes exeres
I'm sure these websites are fantastic, their content is wonderful, their authors are well endowed, and they have a massive rabid community following. Look at those links and, without clicking them, see if you can figure out where the hell you are going. If I see a GUID I will be less inclined to click on it because of my admittedly irrational distaste. If it's an article, I think most people would prefer to see a publishing date and the title of the article in the URL. If it's an item for sale, put the item's name in the URL like amazon does.
I'm so happy this isn't a really common thing. I know this is a stupid thing to pick on and like I said, I fully recognize their importance. Am I the only one who hates looking at them in URL's? Does anyone prefer to see a GUID?
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Visible GUIDs, A Tech Pet Peeve of Mine
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7 comments:
I think rarely anyone would like them ;)
Also, they are bad for SEO.
What I hate even more are session IDs in URLs. You can't use them for a link or spread them via E-Mail/IM without having some weird feeling about your security.
Quite the opposite here. A URL is a mechanism to point to a resource.
This notion that it also needs to describe the resource it's pointing to seems a bit much. Use the link tag appropriately to title the resource you've referenced.
@tweekgeek, you don't always have the luxury of a link tag so I think there's nothing lost but a little gained by having the uri be descriptive.
Thanks for your feedback guys.
This made it onto reddit and there is a decent discussion over there. Most people either don't care or don't mind. I suppose this is an issue that people who use IRC could relate to more so than a social network site. Either way, thanks reddit!
You are not alone. Jakob Neilson agrees with you: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html (shame about the numbers in the URL ;)
As well as the SEO argument it just looks unprofessional to me - like building a hi-fi with the wires hanging out the front...
You are exactly right, it's something I'm writing about presently, I believe someone referred to them as "Hackable URLs"; the user should be able to guess, if they see a link:
/Shop/Product/View?fruit=apples
they should be able to guess
/Shop/Product/View?fruit=bananas would take them to the bananas page.
Not only this, given that a lot of rewriters allow you to make friendly routes such as:
/Shop/Product/Apples
Which redirects to
/Shop.asp?product=Apples
It just makes for a nicer user experience.
The problem with GUIDs is it's a lazy keying system. In the world of OODBs, keys can be anything so why not a text key ie product-fruit-apple or product-fruit-apple-coxes. If you don't want to use strings, use a hash of them. Seriously, how many products does your online store have? I'm sure Amazon would have difficulty, but then we already have GUIDs for books, they're called ISBNs.
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