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YouTube Video Page URL Structure Will Change

by Arpit Kumar on 9 March 2010


YouTube today announced to introduce a change in the URL of the individual video pages. In a post on YouTube API blog, YouTube described the upcoming changes:

URLs for YouTube video pages will change from the format http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylLzyHk54Z0 to http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=ylLzyHk54Z0.

That is to say, the ? character in the URL will be replaced with #! characters. Not all users will be directed to the new URLs, and the change will be implemented gradually over time. This change is part of a larger AJAX rewrite of the YouTube web site. The old-format URLs will continue working indefinitely when used for browser navigation, so if your web site has existing links to YouTube video pages, you don’t need to worry about them breaking. [ … ]

Hence, it will not affect the existing links on web pages, as the present URL scheme will continue to work for browsing. Though, this change will certainly affect the tools which use the video URL to extract information about the video. (for example, several YouTube video downloading applications parse the video URL.)

YouTube has informed developers about the upcoming changes, and the developers need to ensure that their applications support both URL structure.



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3 Comments »

  • infopediaonlinehere said: on # 9 March 2010.

    any technical reason behind replacing ? with #! … So in general can we adopt same model in our simple PHP pages also.. will this improve speed of a website…can you blog some thing on this technology

  • Mike said: on # 9 March 2010.

    If you go to:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=ylLzyHk54Z0

    Your web browser will only actually send the bit before the # in the HTTP request, ie:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch

    It’s fine if you’re using javascript, because you can access the data in the address bar.

    I can see what they’re doing but they’ll have to be very careful if they want to get it right.

  • iPad Links: Monday, March 8, 2010 « Mike Cane's iPad Test said: on # 9 March 2010.

    [...] Design: The future of content navigation Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design YouTube Video Page URL Structure Will Change HTML5 apps A Look into Color Theory in Web Design iPhone / iPad icon PSD template Interview: Mike [...]

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