Clean URLs
"Clean" and "cruft-free" describe URLs which are:
English
Română/cars/audi/ is preferable to /cars/audi/index.php or /myprog.jsp?page=cars/audi/./recommendations/2007/xyz/ is better than /~users/jane/current-work/xyz/ or /xyz-team/recommendations/./cars/audi/ and /cars/ford/, instead of /cars/audi/ but /ford-cars/./blogs/andrea/feed/ shows a feed of Andrea's blog, then appending /feed/ to any another blog on the same site should show a feed for that blog.An example of the difference between "clean" and "standard" URLs could be seen as:
Standard:
http://example.com/index.php?section=articles&subsection=recent
Clean:
http://example.com/articles/recent/
or
http://example.com/articles/2007/
Web services have been created that allow users to create short URLs which are easier to write down, remember or pass around. They are also more suitable for use where space is limited, for example in an IRC conversation, email signature, online forum or fixed width document (eg. email). A sample of current web services are provided below:
Ultimately these services hide the final destination from a web user. This can be used to unwittingly send people to sites that offend their sensibilities, or crash or compromise their computer using browser vulnerabilities. To help combat such abuse, TinyURL allows a user to set a cookie-based preference such that TinyURL stops at the TinyURL website, giving a preview of the final link, when that user clicks TinyURLs. Substituting http://preview.tinyurl.com for http://tinyurl.com in the URL is another way of stopping at a preview of the final link before clicking through to it. Opaqueness is also leveraged by spammers[2], who can use such links in spam (mostly blog spam), bypassing URL blacklists.
Furthermore, this approach creates dependency on a third-party service that may change, go away, or maintain privacy-compromising logs of user activity indefinitely.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
