Iāve banned query strings
428 points - yesterday at 4:28 PM
SourceComments
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...
How does this benefit the other website? How does this hurt the authors website?
I am completely confused about the behavior of both side here.
I get that when I run an ad-campaing I want google to add a utm-query string, so I can track which campaign users arrived from - but then the origin and the destination are working together. Here the origin just adds stuff for no reason. Why?
Back in the Stone Age, we called these āWebrings,ā but they werenāt 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 arenāt required to make available to any and all, I use headers.
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)?
Another option to consider is "418 I'm a teapot": teapots usually also don't support query strings
Instead of responding with an error, give a page that states āThe link you followed to get here appears to have had some tracking gubbins added, in case you are a bot following arbitrary links, and/or using random URL additions to look like a more organic visit, please wait while we run a little PoW automaton deterrent before passing you on to the page you are looking for.ā then do a little busy work (perhaps a real PoW thingy) before redirecting. Or maybe don't redirect directly, just output the unadorned URL for the user to click (and pass on to others). This won't stop the extra gubbins being added of course, but neither will the error and this inconveniences potential readers less.
Both are good but it seems fair to give priority to the original.
https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings?
Never have I seen such a sassy web server
I use this bookmarklet to strip query params before sharing a link:
javascript:(()=>navigator.clipboard.writeText(location.origin+location.pathname))();I think 404 probably makes the most sense as the response if a query string is not expected but is present anyways, although 400 might also be suitable.
"I donāt 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 donāt use any query strings" but for some reason ?igsh, which i'm pretty sure is an instagram tracking parameter, is allowed. weird
You canāt just send arbitrary query string parameters to a server and assume they will just ignore them. Just like you canāt just remove query string parameters and assume the URL will work.
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.
Right on! It's so liberating having your own wee corner of the internet.
>Want to share an amazon product on a chat to discuss about it. I would have liked a nice short url that I can copy, instead I get a monstrosity, it forces me to manually select only the id portion of it if I want to share it.
I actually get a lot more annoyed by routing parsers that do the same thing Get requests do only by pretending to be a real URL.
https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings#:~:text=So%20I%E2%...
but this one was too long:
It uses 4xx, but not just 400 :)
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!
No qualms with OP, your site your rules.
umm what? I don't know what they're actually sending where they think this, but if you think curl is broken you should re-think that maybe you're the one doing something wrong.
Here are some examples showing curl not stripping question marks (obviously), I am very curious what this person was actually seeing
$ curl -s 'https://httpbingo.org/get?' | jq .url
"https://httpbingo.org/get?"
$ curl -s 'https://httpbingo.org/get?path' | jq .url
"https://httpbingo.org/get?path"
$ curl -s 'https://httpbingo.org/get?path,query=bananas' | jq .url
"https://httpbingo.org/get?path,query=bananas"
$ curl -s 'https://httpbingo.org/get????' | jq .url
"https://httpbingo.org/get????"
$ curl -sv 'https://httpbingo.org/????' 2>&1 | grep :path
* [HTTP/2] [1] [:path: /????]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.
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.
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.
they added these ugly qses into every click on their site, bonkers: ?ref_=nm_ov_bio_lk
Ensuring both sides of a hyperlink agree/consent was a design flaw that limited the uptake of pre-web hypertext systems. The web's laissez-faire approach demonstrated a looser coupling was far better for users, despite all the new failure modes.
Of course any site/server has the practical power free to treat inbound requests as rigorously (or harshly) as they want. But by the web's essential nature, it is equally part of the inherent range-of-freedom of outlink authors to craft their URLs (and thus the resulting requests) however they want. URLs are permissionless hyperlanguage, not the intellectual property of entities named therein.
Plenty of sites welcome such extra info, and those that don't want it can ignore it easily enough ā including by just not caring enough about the undefined behavior/failures to do nothing.
Though, when a web publisher has naively deployed a system that's fragile with respect to unexpected query-string values, they should want to upgrade their thinking for robustness, via either conscious strictness or conscious permissiveness. Thereafter, their work will be ready for the real web, not a just some idealized sandbox where scolding unwanted behavior makes sense.
> 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
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.