From an SEO standpoint I realize URL structure isn't important anymore (nor should it be), but I'm a little torn deciding how to format the URLs for my new site and have to make a decision before launching it. I'm currently trying to decide between four different formats: http://www.pricewombat.com/forum/4/deal-talk http://www.pricewombat.com/forum/4-deal-talk http://www.pricewombat.com/f/4/deal-talk http://www.pricewombat.com/f/4-deal-talk http://www.pricewombat.com/topic/3/yet-another-test-topic#c44 http://www.pricewombat.com/topic/3-yet-another-test-topic#c44 http://www.pricewombat.com/t/3/yet-another-test-topic#c44 http://www.pricewombat.com/t/3-yet-another-test-topic#c44 http://www.pricewombat.com/deal/2/JetBrains-Software-Free-for-Students http://www.pricewombat.com/deal/2-JetBrains-Software-Free-for-Students http://www.pricewombat.com/d/2/JetBrains-Software-Free-for-Students http://www.pricewombat.com/d/2-JetBrains-Software-Free-for-Students http://www.pricewombat.com/product/203602/Turtle-Beach-Ear-Force http://www.pricewombat.com/product/203602-Turtle-Beach-Ear-Force http://www.pricewombat.com/p/203602/Turtle-Beach-Ear-Force http://www.pricewombat.com/p/203602-Turtle-Beach-Ear-Force Code (markup): Which of those do you like the best?
A number of your links are 404 -- but the first one has illegible colour contrasts in it's menus, and all the "working" links have illegibly useless fixed metric (aka px) font declarations. Apart from that there isn't enough "design" in any of them to say much of anything apart from the accessibility /FAIL/ of fixed layout, fixed fonts, and illegible colors. (seriously, dark gray on black bar on a white layout?!?) Though a quick peek under the hood reveals a terrifying "I can haz intarnets" bunch of gibberish markup; I'd suggest learning some HTML before proceeding any further. Oh wait, are you asking about the URL formats and not the links themselves? Sorry, your engrish made that a bit confusing. Honestly I'm not seeing enough difference between any of them to say one way or the other, apart from the hash link one NOT being what hashes are for.
Because they're invalid. I was asking for feedback on the link structures, not on the pages they link (or don't link) to. How is light gray on black illegible? What's wrong with defining font sizes in px? Most sites do that. Ouch, that's kind of harsh. The website is mostly responsive, but I defined a maximum width as many sites do. How can a font size not be fixed? I agree that the colors can be improved, but everything is legible to me. What on earth are you talking about? '"I can haz intarnets" bunch of gibberish markup'?? How was my post in any way unclear about what I was asking advice on? The title is "Which of these URL structures do you like the best?," and the question is pretty darn clear. Please, enlighten me. What are hashes for, if not for internal jump links?
Sorry if that seemed a bit harsh -- it's what I do. Firm believer you rip things apart so they can be built back up stronger. Allow me to further explain my comments and your questions about them. Yeah, I got that when I re-read it. The unnatural sentence structure kind-of lost me; I seem to be having comprehension issues with a lot of what people SEEM to think is valid English of late. The light of your typical toolbar/address bar above it and the white below it cause eye constriction further upping the need for contrast as what's around that black bar... BUT you don't HAVE a black bar OR light gray. You have a dark gray (#222) background with dark gray (#777) text... and if you know your Web Content Accessbility Guidelines or understand emissive colourspace you'd know that 50% contrast across the spectrum is considered bare minimums, thin fonts with smoothing tech ups that to 75%, and cornea deflection like what you have there makes it 85% OR MORE minumum... Since #555 (the difference) is only 31.25% of the light spectrum you are WAY shy of legibility -- to the point that a quarter the population might not even see you have a menu there! Remember your YUVuv formula for Y... Y = 29.9% Red + 58.7% Green + 11.4% Blue ... and use it for text and backgrounds so you're sure people can actually read your content! Plug in your colours RGB values, and if your background and foreground are less than 50% it's useless, and the ideal is anywhere from 75 to 85% depending on placement, font and OS. Part of why more than half the people making "designs" don't know enough about emissive colourspace to be designing jack ****. What you mean to say is most people who know jack about accessibility and/or are too lazy to build sites properly do that. As the WCAG recommends you should be defining your fonts in %/EM like a good little doobie so that the fonts automatically scale to the users default preferences instead of some goofy arbitrary px size -- that for users like myself leaves me diving to zoom in 30% or MORE!. Just as your layouts should be based in EM's to be elastic. Only time you should be resorting to PX on fonts is when there's a fixed image interaction for something like underneath Gilder-Levin. I'm not seeing a 'maximum width' or responsiveness here at all... It LOOKS like some garbage fixed width layout so either your media queries are busted, or we have different definitions of what "responsive" means. By using % and EM's, which are based on the OS or browser default size so users don't have to "dive for the zoom" -- particularly when it comes to layouts that break disastrously when zoomed (like yours). PX is "fixed metric" / non-scaleable. EM's are not. 1EM might be 16px by default on most machines, but the laptop I'm on right now and my workstation 1EM = 20px, my media center 1EM = 24px, the Sun Blade 2000 in my garage 1EM = 12px. That's why anyone who tells you "62.25% = 1px" lie doesn't know enough about browsers to be flapping their gums on the subject! Sadly as an article a few years ago proved that's half the people working on Safari and part of why Google pulled a "take the money and run" with Blink. Empty style attributes, the mere presence of style attribute and tags, endless pointless DIV for nothing, endless pointless classes for nothing, paragraphs around non-grammatical paragraphs / non-paragraph content, inline-level tags around block-level tags, missing headers, gibberish use of numbered headings, tags inside attribute values, static style in the markup, static scripts in the markup, scripting only elements in the markup, invalid/incomplete forms, that pointless aria code-bloat nonsense, inaccessible scripttard menu hide (that's likely part of an attempt at responsive that's not working here), comment placements that could trip rendering bugs in some versions of FF and IE... Take just this page: http://www.pricewombat.com/forum/4/deal-talk 42k of markup to deliver 813 bytes of plaintext and less than a half dozen content images -- What would you call that? If you don't know why that's wrong, that's four to 8 times the amount of code that should have been used on such a simple page. Internal jump within the same page -- it's unclear how that would compare to the first set of links. I think that's a lot of why I didn't grasp your question, apart from the hashes in the second example I don't get what's different enough about those links to give a flying purple fish one way or the other which you use -- I'd just end up using whatever is easiest to implement on the back-end. Oh, I thought you were grouping each set as by style, not 4 each of style... Yeah, I'm just having trouble deciphering your post. I THINK if I'm deciphering your post correctly I'd go with "1", but I'm STILL not sure I'm even grasping what you're asking. If you mean: http://www.pricewombat.com/forum/4/deal-talk http://www.pricewombat.com/topic/3/yet-another-test-topic#c44 http://www.pricewombat.com/deal/2/JetBrains-Software-Free-for-Students http://www.pricewombat.com/product/203602/Turtle-Beach-Ear-Force Code (markup): (Which is how I'd have grouped them for your question) -- then yes, #1. As a single code block and in the order you had them, it was very unclear which you meant for each group. The reason I'd go with that is it's the most verbose and easiest to parse. Just explode $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] by slash, and you won't end up beating yourself up going "what the hell does 'p', 'f' or 'd' mean" two years from now. You can be BOTH verbose and concise at the same time, since concise STILL MEANS CLEAR. (a concept lost on a good number of programmers, most of whom devote their lives to C) -- Generally when coding anything more complex than a loop/array index I'll take a verbose variable or function name anyday over the uselessly vague single letters and acronyms most people sleaze by with.