The anatomy of a URL

I have just spent the last four hours updating usabilityviews.com with over a month of updates due to my temporary holiday from the web (don't ask). Because of my constant monitoring of dozens of web sites I have decided that URL's are in my blood and I am very sensitive to changes in familiar URLs.

Whilst I was adding the latest entries into my databse I discovered something very surprising.

Jakob Nielsen had started to use human readable descriptive URL's in his alertbox columns. I have been studying (some might call it stalking) alertbox columns for many years now and have mentally noted the changes in Jakob's URL naming strategy.

When Jakob started his alertbox column in 1995 he only published once a month, so a naming convention of yymm.html worked fine.

June 1995 : History has a Lesson for HotJava
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9506.html

In 1997 Jabok moved to a bi-weekly publishing schedule and just added an a or b to the URL to differentiate between the two articles published in the same month.

1 Feb 1997 : WebTV Usability Review
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9702a.html

15 Feb 1997 : TV Meets the Web
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9702b.html

Perhaps as the result of a new years resolution in 1998 Jakob dropped the "a or b" mechanism and moved to a yymmdd.html convention.

1 Jan 1998 : The Web in 1998: Some Predictions
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980101.html

To celebrate the millenium Jakob started to use four digits for the year (yyyymmdd.html) instead of two. I knew that all that publicity about the Y2K bug wasn't wasted money.

9 Jan 2000 : Is Navigation Useful?
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000109.html

This model was used faithfully for the next five years until 15 Aug 2005 when the last of the old-style alertbox articles was published.
15 Aug 2005 : Putting A/B Testing in Its Place
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050815.html

On 29 Aug 2005 Jakob did something very important. He stopped thinking about how his alertbox URLs could be automatically generated using an impersonal algorithm and started to use file names that are actually useful to a human being.

29 Aug 2005 : Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/open_new_windows.html

So credit where credits due, well done Jakob, this is definitely a change for the better.

I have been looking at naming conventions for web articles for years now and I think that it may have sent me slightly mad, but there is one site that I can recommend if you want to see a great example of a usable articles listings site. So if Jakob wants to make any more improvements to the usability of alertbox then I can recommend that he pops over to see how Jared and the other people at UIE do it.

PS. Please don't complain about my naming convention used at usability views as I don't have the time to come up with ten thousand readable names.

Comments

[Jared Spool]

Hi Chris,

I'd love to know what you like about our articles listing.

I've often been frustrated by it myself, but maybe I'm more of an exception than a real users. (Unfortunately, improving it is one of those "downtime" activities that never finds the appropriate amount of downtime to support it.)

[Michael Mahemoff]

Hi Chris, Search engine optimization is probably the main reason people create meaningful URLs, since the URL features highly in those algorithms.

(BTW typo after "In 1997" ...)