The IndieWeb wiki, like Wikipedia, uses concise, descriptive URL slugs. A “slug” is the part of the URL after the domain name. For example, the following page takes you to the wiki page on coffee.
https://indieweb.org/coffee
I have recently been thinking about two benefits of concise URLs such as the one above:
- You can remember the URL so you can type it when sharing a document rather than having to search for the page for which you are looking, and;
- The URL has text that is searchable, allowing you to find both documents and web pages related to the page in search interfaces like Slack Search.
In a recent call, I typed a URL to a wiki page rather than finding the document. This allowed me to share the document faster than going to the website and manually copying the URL.
Google’s URL best practices similarly recommends using “simple, descriptive words” in a URL, giving the example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation
The IndieWeb wiki also uses the hashtag (#) syntax to refer to a specific heading on a page, like:
https://indieweb.org/coffee#Why
The URL above points to the section with the title Why.
While remembering the section title is difficult, particularly for long titles, the URL is still searchable, and offers more context that could be used in a search.
