URL redirection

Feedback
1

I created links between various notebooks in editing mode. For example: ir a la etapa 2/5. These notebooks use “temporal” URLs.

Once I published the notebooks, other people could access to them, but the links are broken, since the “temporal” URL do not seem to be accessible, nor redirected.

Note that, when I’m logged, if I click on the “temporal” URL, I’m redirected to the public URL: OWASP 2018 (2/5) - Web Crypto API - Calcular hashes / Sylvain Lesage | Observable → OWASP 2018 (2/5) - Web Crypto API - Calcular hashes / Sylvain Lesage | Observable.

See the last cell in OWASP 2018 (1/5) - Web Crypto API / Sylvain Lesage | Observable for an example.

2

Sure, here’s what’s going on:

  • ‘temporal’ URLs are what we’d call ‘draft’ URLs, and they’re always private to you. They’re designed to be un-guessable, consisting of random bytes.
  • when you publish a notebook, it grabs a public URL. This URL isn’t ‘allotted’ until you publish, because it’s designed to be immutable: people might use import to build off of your work, so we don’t want it to be super dynamic.

We’re still working on the usability in this area - it’s pretty flawed right now - because linking to a /d/fdafd URL is akin to linking to the URL in a wordpress draft editor, but given that our editing and published UIs are so incredibly similar, that isn’t the mental model it engenders.

I can see that:

  • We don’t make a clear enough UI distinction between draft & publish states
  • And for inter-linking notebooks, it’d be useful to know what the future permalink of a notebook would be
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3

@tom Is there some way to share a notebook with other people without making it fully public? I tried giving away the un-guessable URL, but as you wrote above, it seems to be private to me only.

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4

see https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/changelog-2018-05-07

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5

it might be better if the URL indicated which version it shares (maybe by having /d/fdafd/1234 instead of /d/fdafd )

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6

Sure - this topic needs an update:

Since the last changelog, we support share links! Which means that if you go into the header and click Copy link, then the /d/fjdskal URL becomes accessible to anyone who has the link, and the link is copied to your clipboard.

How this interacts with versioning: when you click Copy link, people see the version of the notebook at that time. You can keep editing the notebook, and your changes won’t be visible to anyone else until you click Copy link again (or if you publish the notebook). The intent is that we want to make it easy to say “oh, just refresh this page” when you’re group-reviewing some content. This is, coincidentally, how we’ve been reviewing changelogs at Observable :slight_smile:

That said, we still want the default to be strong privacy, not just unguessable URLs - so /d/fdsajkl URLs aren’t accessible to anyone else until you click Copy link.

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