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> Honestly, it's as if most web developers don't understand how powerful URLs can be.

Or, more likely, most of the "enterprise" apps with those URLs were first released over a decade ago, when the idea of "pretty URLs" was not yet mainstream. There was not even a mention of mod_rewrite on Wikipedia at that point. The article on the front controller pattern, which most webapps that handle their own URL routing use, wasn't written until 2008.



> most of the "enterprise" apps with those URLs were first released over a decade ago, when the idea of "pretty URLs" was not yet mainstream.

Or, even more likely, the enterprise customer never specified "URLs that aren't terrible" in their 100-page RFP, and so the lowest bidder didn't bother with URLs that aren't terrible.


The first URLs were short and sweet.

HTML, and server paths / CGIs were largely hand-coded and short.

The URI explosion occurred in the late 1990s / early aughts for the most part with Java and Microsoft entering the fray from my recollection.


So like he said, over a decade ago.




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