Best Practices: URL Path Parameters [closed]

Question

What's the current best practice around path parameters in URLs?

For instance

/artist/name

A long time ago I might have made artist.html and then passed in a query parameter /artist.html?name=name but it seems path parameters are the standard (and nicer to look at).

So assume I'm using apache, nginx, etc. Are these just rewritting /artist/name to '/artist.html?name=name` and then the Javascript is reading the query parameters? How is this done in the static html / ajax world we live in?

Thanks

Answer 1

While that's probably how it used to be before (and I do remember writing stuff like that myself), modern websites tend to use web frameworks such as Flask or Django or Ruby on Rails instead of static pages and rewrites.

These frameworks include URL routing, where a certain pattern in the path, for example /artist/<name>, can be mapped to a function getArtist(name).

The query string may then be read by either the backend program or some JavaScript in the page.