Clean URL

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Clean URLs (also known as user-friendly URLs, pretty URLs, search engine-friendly URLs or RESTful URLs) are web addresses or

bookmarking of web resources.[2]

Clean URLs also do not contain implementation details of the underlying web application. This carries the benefit of reducing the difficulty of changing the implementation of the resource at a later date. For example, many URLs include the filename of a

user-agents regardless of internal structure. A further potential benefit to the use of clean URLs is that the concealment of internal server or application information can improve the security of a system.[1]

Structure

A URL will often comprise a

encoded data, session IDs
, implementation details, and so on. Clean URLs, by contrast, contain only the path of a resource, in a hierarchy that reflects some logical structure that users can easily interpret and manipulate.

Original URL Clean URL
http://example.com/about.html http://example.com/about
http://example.com/user.php?id=1 http://example.com/user/1
http://example.com/index.php?page=name http://example.com/name
http://example.com/kb/index.php?cat=1&id=23 http://example.com/kb/1/23
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Clean_URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_URL

Implementation

The implementation of clean URLs involves

rewriting
techniques. As this usually takes place on the server side, the clean URL is often the only form seen by the user.

For search engine optimization purposes, web developers often take this opportunity to include relevant keywords in the URL and remove irrelevant words. Common words that are removed include articles and conjunctions, while descriptive keywords are added to increase user-friendliness and improve search engine rankings.[1]

A

fragment identifier can be included at the end of a clean URL for references within a page, and need not be user-readable.[3]

Slug

Some systems define a slug as the part of a URL that identifies a page in

pathinfo part), which can be interpreted as the name of the resource, similar to the basename in a filename or the title of a page. The name is based on the use of the word slug
in the news media to indicate a short name given to an article for internal use.

Slugs are typically generated automatically from a page title but can also be entered or altered manually, so that while the page title remains designed for display and human readability, its slug may be optimized for brevity or for consumption by search engines, as well as providing recipients of a shared bare URL with a rough idea of the page's topic. Long page titles may also be truncated to keep the final URL to a reasonable length.

Slugs may be entirely lowercase, with accented characters replaced by letters from the Latin script and whitespace characters replaced by a hyphen or an underscore to avoid being encoded. Punctuation marks are generally removed, and some also remove short, common words such as conjunctions. For example, the title This, That, and the Other! An Outré Collection could have a generated slug of this-that-other-outre-collection.

Another benefit of URL slugs is the facilitated ability to find a desired page out of a long list of URLs without page titles, such as a minimal list of opened

tabs exported using a browser extension, and the ability to preview the approximate title of a target page in the browser if hyperlinked
to without title.

Should a tool to save web pages locally use the string after the last slash as the default

file name, like wget
does, a slug makes the file name more descriptive.

Websites that make use of slugs include

Stack Exchange Network with question title after slash, and Instagram with ?taken-by=username URL parameter.[6][7]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Opitz, Pascal (28 February 2006). "Clean URLs for better search engine ranking". Content with Style. Archived from the original on 6 January 2012. Retrieved 9 September 2010.
  2. ^ Berners-Lee, Tim (1998). "Cool URIs don't change". Style Guide for online hypertext. W3C. Retrieved 6 March 2011.
  3. ^ "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax". RFC 3986. Internet Engineering Task Force. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  4. ^ Slug in the WordPress glossary
  5. ^ Slug in the Django glossary
  6. ^ "Question URL slugs based on title". Meta Stack Exchange. 2011-10-10.
  7. ^ "16 Best Instagram Tricks And Hidden Features You Must Know". Fossbytes. 2017-08-04.

External links

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