Almost ten years ago Jakob Nielsen summed up the characteristics of a good URL in his piece URL as UI. Easy, short, structured, hackable, persistent. That’s about all there is to it, really.
For years people have had to deal with URLs that were nothing more than a blurb of technical lingo impossible to decipher. Instead of structured URLs website builders often resorted to breadcrumbs — an overused and often unwarranted design element. Thanks to the rising interest for mod_rewrite, SEO, accessibility and usability however, more and more web addresses actually make sense. Yet it’s sad to see that in 2008, too much web designers and developers still haven’t figured out the importance of URLs.
Consider a URL like this, from the brand new website of the International Film Festival Gent:
http://tickets.filmfestival.be/tickets.cgi?go=moviedetail&id=08-057&sessionid=hlF6xGQZgs3P0TQBWgh206xmR&lang=nl
Compare this to:
http://filmfestival.be/nl/films/sita-sings-the-blues
How hard can this possibly be? How ignorant can you be to still pour all this readily available wisdom down the drain? I’m stumped.
To make matters worse, a deplorable evolution in browser world is now emerging. I’m talking about the feature in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 to display the domain name in black, and grey out all the rest.
The main reason browser vendors are implementing this is to make it easier for non-savvy users to spot phishing domains. But the exact point of phishing is doing your best to blend in with the original. Your mother won’t notice a thing, and what’s worse is she’ll now pay even less attention to all that light grey text up there. The part of the URL that’s actually meaningful. I fear Google and Microsoft have taken a wrong turn here.
I’m afraid I must agree…I understand their point of view, but this ain’t the solution to the phishing problem.