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🔗 Determine URL/query approach #4
Description
Goal: Create a linking strategy where selfdefined.me/AsianAmerican+pan will render a page with a definition for Asian American and pan.
Impact: Users can self-identify via social bios, email signatures, etc.
Considerations:
- Strings should be human-readable, to some degree (similar to
pronoun.is/they), to pique curiousity. - Some cap will have to be set on number of identifiers.
- Endless possibilities of combinations technically exist.
- Solution should not rely solely on JS so that it's more accessible.
- Some sort of generator will need to exist, where a user can pick terms to generate their own string.
- The way each definition is stored will need to be future-proofed for the API, Slack/Twitter bots, etc.
Activity
coilysiren commentedon Oct 20, 2019
Wildcard consideration: I would ideally use this with acronyms, like
WoCTWoCQTPoCetc etc. So that I can have a URL like
selfdefined.me/qtpoctatianamac commentedon Oct 20, 2019
Yes! I'm hoping it can both serve in the way you're saying as well as help with nuance, i.e., when someone wants to be called
Bi+disabledand someone else wants to be referred to bypan+PwD.Are you suggesting that we should avoid with longer terms, like
disabled?Or something else that I'm missing?coilysiren commentedon Oct 20, 2019
I'm suggesting we use both, and allow people to mix and match them however they want! 👩🔬
tatianamac commentedon Oct 21, 2019
Oh yes, that was definitely my intent. I want this to be as exhaustive as possible (while still allowing it to be useful in say, Twitter bios)... but I might not have made my hope very clear in my initial issue file. 🙈
Primigenus commentedon Oct 21, 2019
The simplest form could be
/search?q=propA+propB+propC. The order of the items in the querystring could determine the order of the results shown so that folks can decide which is most important to them. It's similar to linking to a search result that just filters down from all available items to the ones that match the comma-separated selectors. It would also be worth making it fuzzy enough that it gracefully handles typos and alternate spellings.ovlb commentedon Oct 21, 2019
I really like the idea of letting the order of the query strings determine the order of elements on the page.
I am torn, though, on the use of
/searchfor this case. It feels a bit too … maybe: technical for the use case of describing myself.Maybe it could be something like
www.selfdefined.me/?defines="[termA,termB,termC]". Where the query string is effectively the result of callingJSON.stringifyon an array of the slugified terms.We could also have a page like
/definewith a search input that lets users search and combine their personal combination.Edit (19-10-21, 21:20): Realised that Tatiana has mentioned the domain
selfdefined.mein the OP and updated links accordinglydshafik commentedon Nov 18, 2019
Perhaps you could use
selfdefined.me/is/<term>/(and|or|not|but)/<term>/(and|or|not|but)/<term>, so I could do:selfdefined.me/is/heteronormative/and/bisexual/or/pansexual— I appreciate that this means long URLs, so I suggest that two things happen:selfdefined.me/is/heteronormative/and/bi/or/pan)/is/optional (or drop it altogether)Additionally, the use of
+to indicate "and" is problematic as it has URL encoded (%2B) or it will be treated as a space, making it difficult to include terms with a space in them.tatianamac commentedon Nov 19, 2019
@dshafik Thanks for this insight!
non-binarydown toenby(Many non-binary individuals rejectenbyas they feel it's infantilising.)selfdefined.me/prefix suffices for the amount of explanation you can get just from the URL./is/also doesn't make a ton of grammatical sense in this flow.That's a good point about
+signs turning the URL into less human-perceivable language. The intent is to have it be somewhat human perceivable to pique curiousity (as is the case with pronoun.isI worry about it being confusing with all the forward slashes. Could underscores work? What are our options here? (Is it only non-encoded non-reserved/available characters?)
For ex:
selfdefined.me/pan_queerhibaymj commentedon Feb 14, 2020
selfdefined/web-app#72 Would support storage of the % encoded link, so whatever you decide on as the linking structure as long as you encode it (and implement the service right) this should be handled.
lorarjohns commentedon Jul 10, 2020
It's also close to "NB" or "Non-Black", which makes it a kind of controversial term in many ways.
dshafik commentedon Jul 10, 2020
I think if we allow aliases, then it's up to the individual?
I am concerned that if we generate unique short URLs — e.g.
selfdefined.me/is/heteronormative/and/bisexual/or/pansexualbecomesselfdefined.me/d345jd— then I can tell user Foo on Twitter is also user Bar on FetLife, a connection that the individual may not want to disclose, and which could be used to harm them (i.e. facilitates doxxing). Instead we should normalize the URLs such that different permutations of the same thing (e.g./bi/or/panis the same as/pan/or/bi) always yield the same string and then generate the same short URL.