alt Hacker NewsQuery strings are awesome. Especially for one-page applications.
I build a lot of internal applications, and one of my golden UI rules is that a user should be able to share their URL and other users should be able to see exactly what the sender did.
So if you have a dashboard or visualization where the user can add filters or configurations, I have all of their settings saved automatically in the URL. It's visible, it's obvious, it's easy, it's convenient.
>There is also a moral question here about whether it is okay to modify a given URL on behalf of the user in order to insert a referral query string into it. I think it isn't.
These dogmatic technical screeds are all so weird to me. They usually reveal more about the authors lack of experience or imagination than provide a useful truism.
Replies
A relatively minor impact concern is that query strings create a new cache entry both in the browser and typically on server-side caches unless configured otherwise, so you might want to use URL fragment parameters if the parameters are only used by clientside JavaScript but the server response is the same.
Yes, query strings often enable useful features! But Chris's post, "no unauthorised query strings", is only regarding third parties adding them.