I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs

Last evening, a short blog post appeared in my feed reader that felt as if it spoke directly to me. It is Chris Morgan's excellent post I've banned query strings.

Chris is someone whose Internet comments I have been reading for about half a decade now. I first stumbled upon his comments when he left very detailed feedback on one of my collections of CSS rules on Hacker News. I am by no means a web developer. I have spent most of my professional life doing systems programming in C and C++. However, developing websites and writing small HTML tools has been a long-time hobby for me. I have learnt most of my web development skills as a hobbyist by studying what other people do: first by viewing the source of websites I liked in the early 2000s, and later by occasionally getting possessed by the urge to implement a new game or tool and searching MDN Web Docs to learn whatever I needed to make it work. One problem with learning a skill this way is that you sometimes pick up habits and practices that are fashionable but not necessarily optimal or correct. So it was really valuable to me when Chris commented on my collection of boilerplate CSS rules. It helped me improve my CSS a lot. In fact, a few of the lessons from his comment have really stuck with me; I keep them in mind whenever I make a hobby HTML project: always retain underlines in links and retain purple for visited links.

I have been following Chris's posts and comments on web-related topics since then. He often posts great feedback on web-related projects. Whenever I come across one, I make sure to read them carefully, even when the project isn't mine. I always end up learning something nice and useful from his comments. Here is one such recent example from the Lobsters story Adding author context to RSS.