-2

I've noticed that on Facebook I can do facebook.com/firstname.lastname but twitter does not allow this.

I can not use dots, I have to use twitter.com/firstnamelastname.

Dots make it more readable plus I want all my public profiles to be the same. I don't want to use the allowed underscore ( _ )

As far as URLs go, dots hold no special value so I don't understand why they are forbidden.

This question was also asked on quora.com with out an answer here

Zen-Lee Chai
  • 431
  • 1
  • 4
  • 10
  • Why don't you ask Twitter? I fail to see how this question is on-topic for this site. – Felix Kling Jul 13 '15 at 12:22
  • 3
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not about a programming problem. – Felix Kling Jul 13 '15 at 12:23
  • This will be different in each application. The developers can choose what they want. I think there is no reason needed for this. – apm Jul 13 '15 at 12:24
  • They are in fact valid - see here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1547899/which-characters-make-a-url-invalid – Zen-Lee Chai Jul 13 '15 at 12:26
  • Valid they are, it's just the developers who choose what characters to allow. Same as different websites allow different characters for the passwords. Some time there is a reason for one choice or another, but often it's just an arbitrary choice. The reason to include dots or underscores is to allow splitting of words (e.g. firstword.secondword or firstword_secondword). Both are equally good for the job, so it doesn't matter. So the Facebook devs chose the dot whereas the twitter devs chose the underscore. – Dakkaron Jul 13 '15 at 12:32
  • It does in fact matter as programming does relate to UX. From a UX perspective there is no reason to not let a user use anything they want that is technically valid. From a programming perspective one needs to know all the valid URL characters and possibly apply them to regular expressions. – Zen-Lee Chai Aug 25 '15 at 15:29

2 Answers2

1

The simple answer is because someone decided to do it this way. It might be that their framework doesn't allow for dots, or it might be that the developer decided that this charset (alphanumerics + underscore) is enough. In the end, no one but the original developer will have a proper answer, but most probably it was just an arbitrary choice.

Dakkaron
  • 5,930
  • 2
  • 36
  • 51
1

There is not a technical reason not to allow dots in the URL as they are a valid character.

From a user experience perspective it is a poor choice as it limits the user unnecessarily.