After rediscovering this great write up from Tim Berners-Lee (the architect of the WWW) about the subject of URLs containing subject information while doing research on what is allowed in a valid URL (just ASCII really) I have decided to go back to flat directory structures and isosec identifiers for KEG. The resulting web addresses will be very easy to save and exchange and be forced to depend on the title for any meta information about the link (ex: https://rwx.gg/20221113084004 or just https://rwx.gg/2). I honestly don’t know how I allowed myself to get sucked back into that idiocy that destroyed the Web in the first place.
Your example is a bad URL – but not just because it has both an id and a “slug” (the abbreviated, hyphenated form of the page title). Putting the page title into your URL is problematic in the long term. Content will change over time. If you ever change the title of that blog post, you’ll be forced to choose between keeping the old URL, or changing the URL to match the new title. Changing the URL will break any previous links to that page; and not changing it means you’ll have a URL that doesn’t match the page. Neither is good for the user. Better to just go with www.myblog.com/posts/123.
Users often do need to type a URL, but more importantly, sometimes they’ll also edit existing URLs to find other pages in your site. Thus, it’s often good to have discoverable URLs. For example, if I want to see post #124, I could easily look at the current URL and figure that the URL for the page I want to see is www.myblog.com/posts/124. That’s a level of user-friendliness that can be a big help to people trying to find what they’re looking for. Including other information (like the subject of the post) can make this impossible – so it reduces my exploration options.
Forget about SEO. Search engine technology has been reducing the effectiveness of SEO hacks for some time. Good content is still king – and in the long run, you won’t be able to game the system.
I love that this puts into start, real contrast the fucking idiocy of them people who created Medium and blogging platforms like it. They have destroyed the intention of the Web beyond repair.