I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs

Last evening, a short blog post appeared in my feed reader that felt as if it spoke directly to me. It is Chris Morgan's short and excellent post called I've banned query strings. Wisdom on the Web Chris is someone whose Internet comments I have been reading for about half a decade now. I first stumbled upon his comments when he left very detailed feedback on one of my collections of CSS rules on Hacker News. I am by no means a web developer. I have spent most of my professional life doing systems programming in C and C++. However, developing websites and writing small HTML tools has been a long-time hobby for me. I have learnt most of my web development skills as a hobbyist by studying what other people do: first by viewing the source of websites I liked in the early 2000s, and later by occasionally getting possessed by the urge to implement a new game or tool and searching MDN Web Docs to learn whatever I needed to implement those hobby projects. One problem with learning a skill…