Good idea to use colons in url?

Question

I'm building a small system, which has nice htaccess rewritten urls. Now I'm wondering if it's a good idea to use colons for it. Here's an example:

domain.tld/section:Foo/page:12

It's a lot more stable than something like this, as it describes every string:

domain.tld/section/Foo/12

The only problem is, will all browsers support it right? I know Wikipedia uses them :)

Matti Laine

Yes, all browsers support it. It's not as good as it looks like for SEO, for instance .. if that has any relevance to you... — yoda, Feb 07 '11 at 14:38

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

1

It's highly unrecommended. It's not standards-compliant, and can cause some trouble.

See: Is a colon safe for friendly-URL use?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

Community

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answered Feb 07 '11 at 14:38

Ofer Zelig

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That question is about making sure that "no colon [...] will be url-encoded by browsers". That doesn't mean they are not safe and, if fact, not the same question *at all*. – Andrew White Feb 07 '11 at 15:00
You are right Andrew, but I wanted to point out that a decision to support colons might introduce other [unexpected] problems, not necessarily on the client side. – Ofer Zelig Feb 07 '11 at 15:29

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 07 '11 at 14:37

Yes browsers will be fine with it. However, I don't see why it's more "stable" than the usual /Foo/12. The whole point of url-rewriting is that you don't expose what the parameter names are (i.e. ?section=Foo&page=12). If you're just putting parameter names back in then what was the point?

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 07 '11 at 14:38

The colon is fine browsers; will URL encode any characters that would cause problems. The later form (using slashes) is more inline with the REST architecture which will probably be more recognizable/standard if you plan on offering something like a webservice in the future.

Good idea to use colons in url?

3 Answers3