alt Hacker NewsThere’s nothing ruder in hypertext etiquette than giving someone a link to navigate to someone else’s HTTP server, where you have manipulated that URL in some way unsanctioned by the server you are sending them to.
You can’t just send arbitrary query string parameters to a server and assume they will just ignore them. Just like you can’t just remove query string parameters and assume the URL will work.
Replies
abecode • yesterday at 9:45 PM
My use case for this is making separate bookmarks in different folders for a single URL:
Example.com/interesting -> bookmark folder one
Example.com/interesting?dummy=t -> bookmark folder two
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In fact, you usually can just send arbitrary query string parameters to a server - that's why the behavior is so common, and often useful.
Most sites don't mind or break, some sites get value from the behavior in ways hard to replicate in other ways – and those sites that don't like such additions can easily ignore them. And a few lines of code will work better than ineffectually appealing to manners, when the freedom of the web's form of hypertext, and protocols, gives the outlink authors full freedom to craft URLs (and thus requests) however they like.