Make your URLs human-guessable

Christian Crumlish

Web addresses were never supposed to be human-readable. The fundamental hyperlinking concept of the Web is intended to mask the underlying Internet protocols and commands required to retrieve data. But the reality is that we see, store, type, copy, and paste URLs all the time (or else the "dotcom" meme would never have taken off), and we sometimes need to guess a URL by chopping, rewriting, or simply conjuring a possible address from the imagination.

So reality suggests that we create URLs that make as much sense to people as they do to databases and web servers. Jesse James Garrett writes about how to make your URLs user-friendly in an article at AdaptivePath.com:

Systems that don't take this user behavior into account pull the rug out from under users who have come to rely on readable URLs.