Unsung Heroes: Flickr’s URLs Scheme

Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung (which is just an incredibly good and fun weblog):

Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in
the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this:

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-72177720330077904

This was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant www.
in front or awkward .php at the end. No parameters with their
unpleasant ?&= syntax. No % signs partying with hex codes.
When you shared these URLs with others, you didn’t have to retouch
or delete anything. When Chrome’s address bar started
autocompleting them, you knew exactly where you were going.

This might seem silly. The user interface of URLs? Who types
in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most
efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve
already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster
than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on.

In general, URLs at Daring Fireball try to work like this.

• This post: /linked/2026/03/02/wichary-flickr-urls
• In Markdown: /linked/2026/03/02/wichary-flickr-urls.text
• This day’s posts: /linked/2026/03/02/
• This month’s posts: /linked/2026/03/

I say “in general” because the DF URLs could be better. There should be one unified URLs space for all posts on DF, not separate ones for feature articles and Linked List posts. Someday.

Wichary subsequently posted this fine follow-up, chock full of links regarding URL design.