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General Web Design
Beginners to web design.
Thread: Funny symbols in urls?
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 7
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Lifesnadir
Stranger Joined: Jan 9, 2005 Post Count: 8 Status: Offline |
In the Killer tutorial, it says: Don't use funny symbol like: $, %, ^, & in your page names. Stick to standard letters and numbers. I'm curious... Why do so many commercial sites have "funny symbols" like % ? in their urls? Also I was reading a tutorial directed at school age kids & teachers. The teacher wrote that the tilda symbol ~ is only used in commercial sites and should never be in a personal website. Why? I have pages named by a range of years, like 1850~1860 which looks clearer in the address than a hyphen 1850-1860. Am I wrong to use the ~ in my urls? Lifes Told ya I have a lot of questions.  |
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RaptorRex
Advanced Member Joined: Sep 16, 2005 Post Count: 126 Status: Offline |
Many characaters have special meanings in a URL. ? starts a variable list that is passed to the file being accessed & separates variables in that list = equates a variable name with its value % is used to code a character as hexidecimal http://jfsflf.com/cgi-bin/script.pl?do=open%20page&whi=that.html Other characters are prohibited too since not all computer systems are the same. Some thought is put into accommodating a large proportion of systems. Where their may be conflict, bad characters are converted to hex using % (ex: %20 is a space). You should not have a file that starts with a period either because it can cause problems on a Unix server (hidden file). Yes, you can use a tilde ~ as far as I know. |
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
Rex explained it well, most of the symbols you see in commercial sites are there as the sites are created dynamically from info in a database using languages like PHP. Those also cause those pages not to be indexed by search engines who tend to stumble over such characters. Now for the rest, question is are you using the tilde in the name ro the title? 1850~1860.html would be bad. But of the tilde is only in the <title>1850~1860</title> tag, then it would be fine. However tilde has a meaning, the question is what it means and that I am not sure of. I persnally would say better to use a Dash as it is recognized as meaning "until" ro "to", 1850 to 1860. Visually it is clear what you mean, but not all web surfers are visual. Blind users use screen readers, these are programs that ride piggy back on a browser and read the content over speakers. It will read what a symbol means. For instance you will see many breadcrumb navagtion use >, so say for a school : Students > Class Photos > 1992 > 5th Grade. Now visually it tells us that you are on the page of the 5th grade, under the year 1992, under the link class Photos under the page Students. The same read aloud would be : Students Smaller Than Class Photos Smaller Than 1992 Smaller Than 5th Grade Which makes little sence really. So one ust really know what symbol has what menaing or you make your site difficult to use for the disabled.I have requested info on the tilde and a decent site to learn about symbol meanings, will post when I have a link. Alot of symbols you do not understand, nor would you normally as it is really only for print media and journalism. But that is now important on the web. MANY PEOPLE LIKE TO WRITE IN CAPS TO BE COOL OR THEY THINK IT IS EASIER TO READ. But the fact is your eyes are trained to read a mix of sizes and what letter or word is capitalized has meaning as well, so it is harder to read. Also in print media this has represented yelling at the reader for hundreds of years, so it is considered rude. So it is a good thing to pay attention to the rules of journalism in web sites too. There are alot of little things to keep in mind when building good web sites. |
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
Ok, more on the Tilde, according to Wikipedia you could use it as you wish: It is sometimes used as punctuation (instead of a hyphen or dash) between two numbers, to indicate that they are a range, rather than subtraction, or a hyphenated number (such as a part number or model number). Japanese and other Asian languages almost always use this convention, but it is often done for clarity in other languages as well. For example: 12~15 means "12 to 15", ~3 means "up to three" and 100~ means "100 and greater". In Japanese, the tilde is also used to separate a title and a subtitle in the same line. Now the reply from Patrick Lauke (aka Redux, one ofthe leaders in the accessibility field) suggested: i'm not sure i'd recommend using it as a separator or to denote a period of time, as it may be read out funky by screen readers...maybe replace with a small graphic and an alt of "to"? However I do not have a screen reader to really figure out how it would be read out, also it depends on which screenreader and how old it is. Mostly used is JAWS, but with a price tag of well over $1,000, many visually impaired may still be using older versions of it. |
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RaptorRex
Advanced Member Joined: Sep 16, 2005 Post Count: 126 Status: Offline |
LSW: Wikipedia also has some info on the tilde as it relates to WWW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde#Computing I remember the old home pages all having ~johny addresses. I personally, see no objection to using ~ in a file name except that it is difficult to type. It may break with convention with respect to home directories and backups (according to wikipedia) however, as long as the tilde is not at the beginning or end of the file name, I don't see a problem. IMHO Do accessibility readers read file names to their users? I am presuming not. |
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
I would avoid it, page names should only use - or _ and no special characters or spaces. Nor start with capital letters or special characters. Oooops forgot to add the link to the Wikipidia - thanks for adding it. PixelDiva replied to me: lsw wrote: Edit: Can anyone test this and let us know how the tilde would be read out in this case? 1850 ~ 1860 and is there a chance that older versions of screenreaders may react differently then newer versions? Man I have to get a copy... and I never considered tha special characters could have a different meaing in different countries... *sigh* there is always something new to consider with accessibility hugh? It'll more than likely depend on the individual verbosity settings as well as the particular version. But just for you, I paused my music of the day to give it a test... Smile On JAWS 5.10 on default verbosity setting for punctuation (some) it just ignored the tilde and read it out as 1850 1860. When I managed to find the verbosity settings and change it to (most) it read out the tilde, but read it out as "til de", so 1850 til de 1860. So based on that, and using the gross generalisation that not everone knows what a tilde is and means, I'd probably go with 1850-1860 if I was trying to indicate a date range. |
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Lifesnadir
Stranger Joined: Jan 9, 2005 Post Count: 8 Status: Offline |
Ok, got it. My file name was going to be families_1851~1860-1 or -2 -3 depending on how much data I had in that year span. (with other files named the same with different years, such as 1851~1860-1 1861-1870-1 1871~80-1 etc) But I'll try it with families_1851-60-1 I just thought it would have too many dashes and look confusing. It helps to know that the ~ symbol has more meanings. And thanks for posting the other symbol meanings. I had NO idea of all that! Lifes |
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