I’ve recently got a Fitbit, and I use the website for logging food. I noticed something about the URL scheme that I’ve seen elsewhere and it made me think about how to design default points in URL schemes.

On Fitbit, ‘/foods/log’ opens the page for today’s food, and there are controls to navigate to yesterday and beyond, when the URL changes to ‘/foods/log/{date}’. So far, so simple. But when I navigate back to today, the URL still contains the date. My browser is set to reload pages from last time, so the first URL always gives me today. The second, doesn’t.

Should we set defaults that can change based on context? Or should the default redirect to the appropriate context? Or should we always be explicit? Should default URLs automatically redirect?

If I load the page before midnight but submit after, the screen and the URL indicate different dates. What is the right date?

UPDATE: The new Fitbit logging page, which appears occasionally at/foods/log takes the date as an explicit parameter (it’s a drop-down on the page), so no longer has a default. This is a much better strategy for submitting data