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A retrospective appreciation of Flickr's URL design philosophy from the late 2000s, highlighting how clean, human-readable, and hierarchical URLs serve as a user interface. Flickr's scheme avoided query parameters, hex encoding, and redundant prefixes, making URLs short, guessable, and editable. The author reflects on how this design influenced their own work and suggests minor modern improvements like removing the /photos prefix and adding human-readable slugs.

Unsung heroes: Flickr’s URLs scheme – Unsung

<p>I primarily develop web applications, and I am still always thoughtful about how I build URLs, even though most of my colleagues say that it wouldn’t matter.
Yes, a tiny percentage of people even look at them, and even fewer really use them in any capacity, but still…
And if I see any website where people invested this effort in their URLs as well, it just gives me an additional feeling about the developers caring about their work.</p>
