What are some pros/cons for using camelCase vs hyphens in URLs for a username? As in, what is better (in terms of readability, writability, style, SEO, other):
example.com/justinBieber (a la Instagram, YouTube, Twitter)example.com/justin-bieber (a la Quora, Wikipedia, LinkedIn)External references will also be welcome.
URLS in general are case sensitive so you could go and use both. But Users don't tend to write urls capitalized and as far as I've seen most urls use dashes it's also simpler this way to see what words are inside the url.
Also note that your example displays a username, it's better to reflect the actual username and you won't be adding hyphens to a username, in this case either don't capitalize or use it as the user did input the name.
Lots of people here use Experts Exchange as example, which would result in ExpertsExchange, which might read strangely. Yet still it's entirely up to what you are most comfortable width both is allowed.
I've once had a website hosted on IIS not sure if anyone still uses this, but this wasn't case sensitive and you'd be able to write the url like http://myurl.com/expertsexchange. In this case you'd wish you'd use dashes.
Still, entirely opinion based. but I find the hyphens easier to read.
readability – Visual separation of separate items in the reader’s mental model is a good thing. In Western names, spaces have been used for that traditionally and the best approximation (while %20 is displayed verbatim) is the underscore _ that MediaWiki is using. Hyphens couple two items in a specific order, they are used in given names and in family names but not between both. Initial capitals are the default in proper names, but medial caps have also been used to tie a prefix to a base (McDonald etc.). Keep in mind that lowercase ‘l’ may look like uppercase ‘I’ and there are some other potential lookalikes; it will not always be obvious from the context which one was meant. This alone may be enough to discourage uppercase letters without preceding space or other explicit separator.
writability – Case insensitive roman letters without other characters is probably the easiest for most writers. There will be spaces between logical items, and probably other separators that should not be used to differentiate two user names: my name = myname = my-name = my_name = my%20name = MyName = $MY<NA*ME! …
style – Some people like to get creative with choosing and typesetting their name, e.g. upside-down or reverse letters from IPA, Cyrillic butterflies, emoji, letters repeated more than once, digits for letters, cRaZy case mix, markup etc. For the sake of usability you should not let them, but for user experience it may be nice and there can be a canonical user name automatically generated from a display user name.
SEO – For user names? Don’t bother.
I tend to use hyphens and lower-case letters.
From Google: "Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs."
Google source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en
My arguments: - Google can read and interpret words separated by a hyphen - the URL remains readable to humans
Sven
As far as I think, neither. Let me explain.
If you have one username for all of your accounts (hyphen or not), then use that username.
But this is very unlikely for most people. If you pick a username, most of the time, you have to use that forever (Ex: Google). In addition, to pick the desired username, that username should be available in the first place. If that username is already taken, then you have to select something else.
Furthermore, some websites don't let you pick a username. You have to get what they gave to you. For example, in Quora, the username will be automatically created based on your name and it will be created with a hyphen (Justin-Bieber). So, you don't have a choice there.
Other websites like StackExchange won't give you a username at all. They give you a number (670***). Not to mention, some websites add additional paths such as 'In', 'User", 'Profile", etc to the URL. (Ex: linkedin.com/in/justinbieber/)
No matter how careful you're, you're always not getting the perfect username. Therefore, my recommendation is, if you want a better URL (or a username), buy a domain in your name (or in your brand) and use it to link (redirect) all of your profiles. This way, you have the control of your usernames and URLs. It's good for the writability, style, SEO, etc.
Here is an example...
JustinBieber.com/Instagram - Redirect to https://www.instagram.com/justinbieber
JustinBieber.com/Quora - Redirect to https://www.quora.com/profile/Justin-Bieber
JustinBieber.com/LinkedIn - Redirect to https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbieber/
JustinBieber.com/Instagram
JustinBieber.com/YouTube
JustinBieber.com/Twitter
JustinBieber.com/Quora
JustinBieber.com/Wikipedia
JustinBieber.com/LinkedIn
JustinBieber.com/StackExchange
