I’ve banned query strings

moritzwarhier

This is cool and creative! It uses 4xx, but not just 400 :) https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings?why=unknown

gtowey

"wander console" sounds like they're just web rings re-invented. In the era of forced feeds by giant corporations which consist of the things they want you to see, I've wondered if this old idea would make a comeback. Human curated content from trusted people seems like the only way forward.

julianlam

> After I implemented that feature, a page from one of my favourite websites refused to load in the console... the third URL returns an HTTP 404 error page. The website uses the query string to determine which one of its several font collections to show. Yes, let's unilaterally decide that query strings are bad because one website (ab)uses query strings to load different fonts. It's the query strings that are the problem, not the website! jfc. Look, I'm against utm fragments as much as the next guy, but let's not throw away a perfectly good thing because tracking is evil.

sigseg1v

Adding query strings is one of those things that I think a lot of sites could get away with more easily if they were reasonable about it. A link that is "https:// web.site" is fine. A link that is "https:// web.site?via=another.site" is fine. A link that is "https:// web.site?fbm=avddjur5rdcbbdehy63edjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63edaaaddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednzzddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63edn" is annoying as shit and I need to literally apologize to people after sending it if I forget to manually redact the query string. Don't abuse this.

1shooner

>So I’ve decided to try a blanket ban for this site: no unauthorised query strings. His site returns (I think incorrectly) a 414 if a request includes a query string. If this protest is meant to advocate for the user, who presumably wasn't able to manage that string in the first place, why would you penalize them for it being there? Why not just use it as a cue to tell users how they can make this decision themselves (e.g. through browser tools)?

arjie

Just referrer policy of strict origin when cross origin gives host level referer (sic) header in most mainstream browsers unless user has configured otherwise right? That’s usually enough for web authors to know what audience they’re appealing to and privacy-maximizers can turn off that header sending.

gwern

Query strings break unpredictably, and that alone is enough to ban them by third parties, especially for something as minor as referral tracking. Example: The Browser is a well known link aggregation paid periodical. I subscribe, and every 1 in 10 or 20 links I clicked, it'd just break outright and I'd have to tediously edit the URL to fix it (assuming the website didn't do a silent ninja URL edit and make it impossible for me to remember what URL I opened possibly days or weeks ago in a tab and potentially fix it). This was annoying enough to bother me regularly, but not enough to figure out a workaround. Why? ...Because TB was injecting a '?referrer=The_Browser' or something, and the receiving website server got confused by an invalid query and errored out. 'Wow, how careless of The Browser! Are they really so incompetent as to not even check their URLs before mailing an issue out to paying subscribers?' I wondered the same thing, and I eventually complained to them. It turns out, they did check all their URLs carefully before emailing them out... emphasis on 'before', which meant that they were checking the query-string-free versions, which of course worked fine. (This is a good example of a testing failure due to not testing end-to-end or integration testing: they should have been testing draft emails sent to a testing account, to check for all possible issues like MIME mangling, not just query string shenanigans.) After that they fixed it by making sure they injected the query string before they checked the URLs. (I suggested not injecting it at all, but they said that for business reasons, it was too valuable to show receiving websites exactly how much traffic TB was driving to them on net, because referrers are typically stripped from emails and reshares and just in general - this, BTW, is why the OP suggestion of 'just set a HTTP referrer header!' is naive and limited to very narrow niches where you can be sure that you can, in fact, just set the referrer header.) But this error was affecting them for god knows how long and how many readers and how many clicks, and they didn't know. Because why would they? The most important thing any programmer or web dev should know about users is that "they may never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... (excerpts & more examples: https://gwern.net/ref/chevalier-boisvert-2019 ). No matter how badly broken a feature or service or URL may be, the odds are good that no user will ever tell you that. Laziness, public goods, learned helplessness / low standards, I don't know what it is, but never assume that you are aware of severe breakage (or vice-versa, as a user, never assume the creator is aware of even the most extreme problem or error). Even the biggest businesses.... I was watching a friend the other day try to set up a bank account in Central America, and clicking on one of the few banks' websites to download the forms on their main web page. None of the form PDF download links worked. "That's not a good sign", they said. No, but also not as surprising as you might think - the bank might have no idea that some server config tweak broke their form links. After all, at least while I was watching, my friend didn't tell them about their problem either!

jedimastert

You know I was actually really curious about this so I went back to the HTML and URL W3C standards and surprisingly they don't actually have any definitions of format other than being percent encoded. One might conflate query strings with "form-urlencoded"[0] query strings, which is one potential interoperability format, but in general a queries string is just any percent encoded string following a "?" in a url[1], and just another property in the "URL" HTML object that can be used in the generation of a response. While additionally there is a URLSearchParams object that is the result of parsing the query string with the form-urlencoded parser, this is simply an interoperability layer for JavaScript. I'm going to be honest, I was pretty geared up to have a contrarian opinion until I looked at the standards but they're actually pretty clear, a 404 could be a proper response to unexpected query string; query string is as much part of the URL API as the path is and I think pretty much everyone can acknowledge that just tacking random stuff onto the path would be ill advised and undefined behavior. [0]: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#application/x-www-form-urlencod... [1]: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-class

humodz

The tone of this and Chris's post gives me the impression that it's harmful to include these query parameters, but I don't understand how. Could someone elucidate me? I understand it can mangle some URLs and that's good enough reason not do it, but even then it seems like a minor incovenience.

ChrisMarshallNY

> It is a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website explore interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent personal website owners. Back in the Stone Age, we called these “Webrings,” but they weren’t as fancy. One of the issues that I faced, while developing an open-source application framework, was that hosting that used FastCGI, would not honor Auth headers, so I was forced to pass the tokens in the query. It sucked, because that makes copy/paste of the Web address a real problem. It would often contain tokens. I guess maybe this has been fixed? In the backends that I control, and aren’t required to make available to any and all, I use headers.

legitster

Query strings are awesome. Especially for one-page applications. I build a lot of internal applications, and one of my golden UI rules is that a user should be able to share their URL and other users should be able to see exactly what the sender did. So if you have a dashboard or visualization where the user can add filters or configurations, I have all of their settings saved automatically in the URL. It's visible, it's obvious, it's easy, it's convenient. >There is also a moral question here about whether it is okay to modify a given URL on behalf of the user in order to insert a referral query string into it. I think it isn't. These dogmatic technical screeds are all so weird to me. They usually reveal more about the authors lack of experience or imagination than provide a useful truism.

dang

Since the original source hadn't had a discussion on HN yet, I've put that link ( https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings ) at the top and moved the response link ( https://susam.net/no-query-strings.html ) to the toptext. Both are good but it seems fair to give priority to the original.

willthefirst

I mean…the site that broke should know what to do with arbitrary query strings. If your site breaks when someone puts in an invalid query string, that’s on you?

Aardwolf

> You could argue that I’m abusing 414 URI Too Long. I respond that it’s funnier this way. Other options I considered were: Another option to consider is "418 I'm a teapot": teapots usually also don't support query strings

notlive

Referrer is sometimes nice to know. If your site gets a traffic spike from an email newsletter that traffic won't correctly identify the source in the http headers. No qualms with OP, your site your rules.

peesem

edit: not true https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077990 "I don’t like people adding tracking stuff to URLs" and "You abuse your users by adding that to the link" and "no unauthorised query strings" and "At present I don’t use any query strings" but for some reason ?igsh, which i'm pretty sure is an instagram tracking parameter, is allowed. weird

arexxbifs

Running your own small website is a constant battle against grifters and bad online etiquette. When people hotlink images, I usually make a point of having some personal fun with mod_rewrite.

dredmorbius

This is genius, kudos Chris. It also makes me wonder what other noxious online behaviours might be addressed through ... creative ... client-side responses similar to this. We've already seen, for years, sites attempting to socially-condition people over the use of ad-blockers and Javascript disablers. No reason why the Other Side can't fight back as well.

hamdingers

While I don't take the author's hard stance, I do hate gratuitous query params that result in links that are thousands of characters long. I use this bookmarklet to strip query params before sharing a link: javascript:(()=>navigator.clipboard.writeText(location.origin+location.pathname))();

shevy-java

> It’s my website: I can do what I want with it. > And you can do what you want with yours! That does not make a lot of sense. Yes, you can do what you want with your website, but query-string is a way for users to query for additional information or wants or needs. I use them on my own websites to have more flexibility. For instance: foobar.com/ducks?pdf That will download the website content as a formatted .pdf file. I can give many more examples here. The "query strings are horrible" I can not agree with at all. His websites don't allow for query strings? That's fine. But in no way does this mean query strings are useless. Besides, what does it mean to "ban" it? You simply don't respond to query strings you don't want to handle. We do so via general routing in web-applications these days.