Why not make your URLs responsive? | Hacker News Reader

Why not make your URLs responsive?

responsiveurl.co.uk

74 pointsjamesjyu28 comments

I was all "NOOOOOOOOOO!" until I got to the "Seriously?" part, hahaha.

Ditto.

Doesn't seem like such a bad idea to do this for page titles. When I have lots of tabs open, each of my tabs is less wide than it would be if it were the only tab open. Nearly every tab has a truncated title in it.

Especially when a lot of sites include their name at the beginning of the title, I just end up with a lot of tabs titled things like Comm.. and Hack.. etc. When I use Firefox I use Tree Style Tabs so it's not a problem but with Chrome there is no good way to get that functionality. The closest approximations I've seen pop up a separate window for the tab tree but that's a terrible kludge and it doesn't play too well with my tiling window manager if I have anything besides the browser on the workspace.

Why not just use short URLs all the time?

Because it's nice to have a URL that is descriptive so I can get an idea of what I'm clicking on before I click on it. Maybe I've just been goatsed too many times...

In that case, you might enjoy this bookmarklet I made a few weeks ago: http://dergachev.github.com/descriptive-url-bookmarklet/

It automatically extracts the title of the current page and appends it to the URL, like so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-pyuaThp-c#doodling-in-math-... http://ihackernews.com/comments/5043231#hacker-news-mobile-d... https://github.com/dergachev/chrome-xpath-link/issues/2#crea... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5043231#devopssysadmin-c... http://drupal.org/node/1427148#meta-how-should-joke-modules-... https://gist.github.com/4331769#rule-of-thirds-bookmarklet http://bl.ocks.org/4360892#u.s.-airports http://www.redmine.org/issues/12778#defect-12778-upgrade-to-... https://twitter.com/dergachev/status/290914183220981760#twit.... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdER... https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-4305#solr-4305-xs... http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/inl/2434325556.html#bes... http://www.flickr.com/photos/54771108@N07/6959604522/#circus...

I wouldn't mind a short URL if I know where it's actually going. Also, if Twitter is a hint, it's very annoying :

https://twitter.com/eksith/statuses/273585529415680000

Twitter could make their URLs contain the entire tweet and I would be thankful if they did so, but it doesn't really make sense for them :)

I believe clean, understandable URLs also help search engines index content more appropriately (and supposedly helps rankings), but with the speed and opaqueness of exactly how indexing works I could be wrong these days.

Edit: I should have said "...of exactly how search algorithms work..."

seo

I would like to see responsive titles based on tab size.

Well, you can rotate the words if it's really that long: http://fiddle.jshell.net/fuDSb/10/show/light/

Interesting demo, even just for its novelty. I would never have thought to do this. Thanks for sharing.

I pretty much think you should implement all those examples, always, regardless of screen size..

This is pretty hilarious :)

As much as I enjoyed the blog post, I enjoyed reading through the comments to see folks who offer their opinion without having even read to the bottom of what is a short post even more.

hahaha I like it.

It isn't that far fetched though, using canonical meta tags you can preserve the main your links on search engines (so you don't SEO ruin yourself).

Most sites have multiple ways to access the same articles/content... no reason not to use a simplified version of this for mobile access. What I mean is, when a mobile is detected use simplified/shortened URLs. Helps if you are copying or manually entering URLs in texts etc...

Very original! Although it's a joke, it boggles the mind he actually thought of it and implemented it. Kudos!

responsive content: latex paper gets tl;tr-ed to a tweet on iphone retina display.

What's also funny is that the majority of commenters didn't read till the end...

Even after reading to the end, I wasn't totally convinced that he wasn't joking about joking. With hash fragments, URL shortening, JavaScript and numerous other obviously-bad ideas being widely considered "acceptable", it's hard to tell when web developers are and aren't serious.

This ruins the history and is not supported on most Android browsers.

> Seriously? Hahahaha, no. This is an absolutely terrible idea, please don't ever do this!

Last paragraph. :)

That' would use up a lot of words in the vocabulary :D

I want responsive favicons... thing is; I'm not joking; it would be very useful if every site had a 128px * 128px and 640px * 640px versions of their favicons (logos?).

I think what you want is explained here: http://www.jonathantneal.com/blog/understand-the-favicon/

IIRC, the HTML5 Boilerplate came bundled with icons of various sizes for Apple devices.

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