On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 9:48 AM, Adam Baso <abaso(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Nemo - I think the concern was that it might be the
case that the
'title' parameter may be at the end of the URL, and the 'title'
parameter
could in principle support a value with forward slashes potentially
indistinguishable from the string in option #2. Of course, regular
expressions can make anything possible in theory :) Anybody else able to
explain further on the title schema risk?
Well, it doesn't work. Not sure I'd call that a risk though :-)
How did that even come up? Why not use an ampersand instead of a forward
slash? Ampersands have a well-defined meaning in the query part of the URL,
while slashes don't.
Personally, I would favor the URL shortener. It is a useful feature on it's
own, good for branding (if you don't shorten, many sites will shorten for
you using their own schema, which results in nondescript URLs), you get
nice URLs (in the short URL you can just factor the parameters into the
shortened part, in the full URL you don't need them because the user has
been counted already), you get less cache fragmentation (even if you remove
the parameter in Varnish, you'll still fragment the client cache). On the
negative side, it's one more request so clicking through becomes somewhat
slower.