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Problem With Date-Based URLs
Saturday, 8 November 2008
A URL is an address which indicates the location of something on a network. After initial appreciation, even obsession, my opinion regarding the use of dates in URLs has changed.
I now think that unless you are specifically working with date-sensitive pages such as news or weblog archives, there is no need to include the published date of an article in a URL. Doing so only serves to make the URL longer and limits its ability to help advanced users guess the location of related content.
As an example take someone is writing a tutorial on their website. The tutorial is divided into a series of articles. The following URL would frustrate a user navigating from the browser address bar because the published date (which is irrelevant to the user navigating the page) would make their guess of substituting the number 1 for 2 in the end a wrong guess:
http://example.com/tutorial/2008/11/08/part-1
http://example.com/tutorial/2008/11/08/part-2 = 404 Page not found
(unless part 2 was published on the same date).
A much better URL would be:
http://example.com/tutorial/part-1
http://example.com/tutorial/part-2 = Success, the second part of the tutorial loads!
Well-designed URL schemes should allow advanced users to guess the location of content related to what they are browsing, and the published date of an article should be featured in the article itself, not in the browser address bar.
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