User centred URL design

I just blogged this article on user-centred URL design to my links blog thinking to read it later, then decided it was short enough to read now. It's good. To the point, and a must read for anyone building dynamic, database backed, searchable (etc) web sites. Like EPSRC whose web site survey I have just ten minutes ago finished filling in. Damn.

Some might argue that, in a perfect world, URLs would be used only by machines, hidden entirely from users. But in our imperfect world, users have come to depend on URLs to communicate key information as they navigate through the Web. Systems that don’t take this user behavior into account pull the rug out from under users who have come to rely on readable URLs. Recognizing that people really do read URLs — and, in turn, making those URLs easy for people to read — is really just an extension of the user-centered philosophy of design. It’s all about creating systems that work the way people work, rather than the way technology works. [Jesse James Garrett]

I guess that the 000058.php in the URL of the article qualifies as "an inscrutable number", but I'm not sure how one would get around this. Finding unique, short, names for articles on a web site when you have a lot of articles to publish would quickly become difficult. Jesse James Garrett's URL is rather better.

There are some pretty hideous autogenerated URLs in the FloodRiskNet web site, such as those for events. They are actually quite misleading too, I notice, because they embed the date on which the event record was created.