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Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with 2a. No reason why this shouldn't be a path that the user can edit to go one level "up" to /search/product/couches.

That's kind of the point of the article - these are parameters for the programmer, but are UI to the user.

Separating parameters by "&", except for the first KVP which is separated by "?" from the URL is not intuitive. On the other hands, they path editing is familiar.

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Unless you have only one product that has color, or that color is the only thing you can filter your couches by, then no, it's not a hierarchy. There no nothing of "going up".

> No reason why this shouldn't be a path that the user can edit to go one level "up"

While I find it more visually pleasing, this is my issue with this style: traversing up would first include /search/product/couches/color, which doesn't make sense. I've seen alternatives like /color:red/ before - which takes away the pairing-problem but feels odd..

And imply you only have product and color. What about size, price, date, description, rating, etc. It is a "search" url after all.

Products aren't hierarchially ordered first by type, then by colour, then by material, etc. These are all attributes that have multiple possible orderings (or no order at all).

Of course, if the site is designed such that it forces you to pick those attributes in a specific order, that URL scheme would make sense (but that would be a poor design for other reasons).

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