Thursday, April 3rd, 2008...1:37 am
Valid URLs and Wordpress
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Today, while poking around WordPress 2.5’s menus, I came across this on the “Write Link” page, and I got a little angry:
Why in the world should I have to remember to add “http://” to my links? It should be the responsibility of the software, not the user, to check and fix a formatting issue as simple as this.
UPDATE: Very shortly after posting this, I realized WordPress actually does fix the URLs for you. That being said, why is the warning there in the first place?
3 Comments
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 am
Years ago there was this effort to remove ‘www’ from all URLs as it is unnecessary. Although the HTTP protocol is neccessary, I believe all browser should look for the HTTP connection first unless you specify another browser-supported protocol (i.e. FTP:// Gopher:// etc.)
Imagine a world where links to things were just viddler.com instead of http://viddler.com/ ? It’d be nice.
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I’ve struggled with this myself a bit, going back and forth on how I feel it should be handled. On one hand, not EVERY url uses the http protocol, so if left blank, the app would have to make an assumption that you don’t want https (or ftp, etc.). Alternatively, that’s a fairly reasonable assumption, and an acceptable default in my opinion.
The “www” part is another story, since www is a valid sub-domain and can be required in some cases. It’s only unnecessary in cases where the DNS and web server have been configured to point it or forward it to the same location, which is usually the default behavior.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
[…] little while back, I complained about WordPress’ handling of URLs without “http://”. While it turns out WP actually handles these correctly, it brings up the question on how to handle […]
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