Clean URLs: bad!

On Pranab’s site

Jun 24, 2024 (IST)

“Clean URLs” like site.com/hello/ should not be used.

NOTE: This is a bit of a shower thought, and the title is a shower thought title — I don’t actually care all that much, though the reasoning makes sense to me.

The reward for these is obvious: clean URLs that are just words separated by slashes. However, there are several (somewhat conceptual) costs.

• Abuse of the index page.

  my-page/index.html is not indexing anything. It’s simply the contents you want to display at my-page/.

• index.html clutter.

  The file tree is littered with index.html pages — files that have the same name and that are not really related. Not to mention folders with only one item.

• Obscure page names.

  A page on a specific topic is called index.html instead of <topic>.html. It does not reflect the contents of the file.

It might make sense for dynamic server side and/or single page applications (with url rewriting), but not so much for static files.

The average user will likely not notice whether the URL ends with .html or not, and someone who notices will likely know, and if they don’t know, they might learn something new.

References to this page:

• Two random foughts