Intro, Part 3: Focus on User-Centered URL Design
First and foremost, the focus of the Well Designed URL Initiative is User-Centered URL Design. Although URLs a.k.a. URIs are used in many places that typical users never see, our primary focus will be to advocate for the designing of those URLs that users do see.
And by “users” I don’t just mean people who are surfing the web using a browser but also people who interact with URLs on many other levels. Those other users include the web developers who build and maintain websites as well as the system administrators who install and maintain the web servers. These users need URL usability just as much as average users, if not more.
What we don’t plan to address, necessarily, are those URLs that humans never see. Yes there are a lot of systems that generate URLs and pass them around from computer to computer but those are not our focus here. The vast majority of URLS are seen by humans[1] and as such are assertion is that those URLs should be understandable by humans too.
At least that’s our contention.
- Even when URLs are machine-generated and used only by machines to communicate with other machines humans still need to debug those systems, so I could argue that well designed URLs make sense even there. But I won’t split hairs today.