alt Hacker NewsWait until you realize that the difference between path and query string is entirely arbitrary and decided by the server. Query strings should never have existed. They are an implementation detail of CGI webservers that leaked all over everything and now smells really bad.
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Nothing you said here is correct. Paths, query strings, and fragments are all well defined entities. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-3.3
Not entirely arbitrary - forms that use the GET method instead of POST will append form values as query params.
For sites without Javascript, it's great for things like search boxes, tables with sorting/filtering, etc. instead of POST, since it preserves your query in the URL.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
Query strings existed before CGI did, and the way they're defined to be filled in from web forms is quite useful; I wouldn't want to need Javascript to fit that into path format. There's nothing wrong about having things decided by the server; I don't get that part of your argument at all.
It's arbitrary to a degree like the difference between using an attribute or child element in XML, but it's not entirely arbitrary. If you want to include data in the URL that's not part of the hierarchy of the path, query strings are good for that.
How do you figure?
Paths are hierarchical; query strings are name/value.
(Note I speak of common usage.)
You can create a different convention, but that one is pretty dang useful.
I dunno, it seems like the fact that we arrived at a fairly standard structure for URL paths that works pretty well is not a bad outcome.
Seems a lot better than the other potential world we could lived in, where paths were a black box and every web server/framework invented their own structure for them.