Glew wish for URLs with both numeric ID and human readable name

Classic wiki URLs are somewhat human readable:

• https://github.com/AndyGlew/Ag-stuff/wiki/Glew-wish-for-URLs-with-both-numeric-ID-and-human-readable-name

Many "modern" apps put some sort of pseudo numeric ID in the URL:

• e.g. Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n_AzMTsszlqmtm909s94gKBzX-uV63EGu3SkQh8rfXE/edit?usp=sharing

I want both.

• The pseudo-numeric ID to reduce name collisions
• A human readable component of the URL, to make it, well, human readable

Some folks say "Humans should never look at the URL. Humans should only ever look at a nicely formatted link."

Well, that might be true, except there is frequently need to edit, to change link format, e.g. going between HTML and various wiki syntaxes.

--

Given the pseudo-numeric ID the human readable URL is mostly redundant. Human friendly perhaps, but not necessary.

One can imagine just permitting arbitrary text as the "human readable" part of the URL.

That could be done… It might even be the easiest thing to be done… But it misses the opportunity to do some sort of checking. For example, the (pnID, human-readable-name) pair might be used provide a consistency check:

• the human-readable-name might be changed, keeping the pNID the same
• this can be version controlled
• and warning/error might be reported if a human-readable-name is ever use that is not in the version control history of the pNID

--

Furthermore, if a page is cloned, i.e. if two copies of the page are created, and then diverged, the (pnID, human-readable-name) pair may help track links across such clone/divergence.

--

See:

• Glew wish for punctuation in URLs