What Is …

It’s just hilarious to me what other people search on, and the suggestion technology at search engines like Google and Ask provide a glimpse of that—a small window into the average netizen’s mind—as well as some light entertainment:

Suggestions at Ask.com for "what is"

Suggestions at Ask.com for "what is"

URI Decomposer

At work, we build our client websites upon a framework uses a lot of GET parameters. It makes for some URIs that average, oh, about three feet in length. Examining some of those monsters can make your eyes cross if you ever need to verify some parameter values in the query string, so I decided it was time for a little tool that would break up the URI into its constituent parts for me, instead of wading wearily though the whole URI myself. Google has a JavaScript URI object that does most of the heavy lifting already. I just had to add code to break up the query string into the individual key-value pairs.

Hence the URI Decomposer was born. You’ll find it among the items on the Tools page (few as they are as of this writing).