Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

One small nitpick: please please don't make all your files download with a single filename.

In the article it gives an example of "fixing" a hideous generated filename like "203759-fs3.pdf" to download as "invoice.pdf".

Yes this is a little nicer, but please be _even_ nicer and put other relevant info in the filename, "invoice-2013-01-01.pdf" is infinitely more useful to me.

Context: My bank forces statement downloads to all come out as "statement.csv" .... once you have a nice collection of "statement [43].pdf" files lying around you soon long for that hidious generated filename (or a semantically better one).



Adding the business name in front of invoice-2013-... would be nice too.


Also the sha1sum of the document. Thanks.


That would probably scare most users, to see a long filename full of gibberish.


Could, but putting it at the end of the document would seem pretty normal given what a lot of users get when downloading stuff. I think url shortners and tublr image urls probably paved the way.


2013-01-01-invoice.pdf sorts better for my purposes.


yeah, but sorting files by date added is usually trivial, so I'd rather have the option of grouping all of the invoices together. But I completely agree that people should name these files to make sorting easier and more useful.


Ah, but date added is not always equal to the date of the invoice. Ex: download 2013-01-01-invoice.pdf today (2013-04-23).


> Yes this is a little nicer, but please be _even_ nicer and put other relevant info in the filename[...]

Aye - another one of my pet peeves is "logo.png". WHICH logo!?


I could not agree more. Why, why, WHY don't people set metadata fields for PDFs (and other documents, but especially pdfs) and why don't websites use/require that metadata? We could be running a semantic web right now and be a year or two ahead of where we are if people would actually think more than one step ahead.

/fume


that's definetly a very good idea. Customize your filenames with a relevant name , adding the date is a very good practice, and why not the user/customer name too ( for invoices,etc ... ).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: