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I am a novice to APIs and I am aware of the major kind of path in a rest API: path such as www.example.com/carsand query parameters such as www.example.com/cars?color=blue.

I just visit an e-commerce website and I am confused about the current path. I selected the category iphone-8 and got that url: https://www.example.fr/iphone-8.html

On the same page, I filter all phones with a price between 250 and 300 euros. This is the new url: https://www.example.fr/iphone-8.html#price=250&price=300

Does this url means that the filter is only applied on the html because of the # and therefore there is no api call for filtering?

Pierre56
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    This is `fragment identifier`. There is a good explanation please check https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29841137/what-is-the-behavior-of-hash-in-query-string – Rabby Hasan Nov 12 '20 at 10:55
  • Very interesting. So it means that the filter is applied on the client-side, when should we apply a filter on the client-side rather than a server-side via a query for example for a e-commerce website? – Pierre56 Nov 12 '20 at 12:16
  • @Pierre56 Not necessarily. More probably the fragment is interpreted client-side and turned into a GET request to populate a table over AJAX via a REST API that does the filtering on the backend. – amphetamachine Nov 12 '20 at 15:45

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Does this url means that the filter is only applied on the html because of the # and therefore there is no api call for filtering?

No that doesn't follow.

The experiment to try would be to load the original page into your browser, turn on the developer tools used to watch the network traffic, and then perform your search.

What you may discover is that when you manipulate the filter controls on the web page, what's really happening under the covers is that java script code is running, and making calls to fetch data from some back end endpoint, and then re-rendering the web page on the client. The fragment is being updated so that, if you were to bookmark the link, or copy it to another tab in your browser, the underlying javascript can reproduce "the same" results (by getting the search parameters from the fragment and repeating the search).

It should be possible to repeat those same calls directly from the browser itself (you won't necessarily get the HTML rendering, of course, but you'll probably be able to look at the filtered results in their own native representation (application/json, perhaps).

What's the avantage of using the frag rather than the query parameters for price?

Fragments are not part of the absolute-URI, and the query part is.

Which is to say, the query part is still part of the identifier of a primary resource, and is part of the request-line that is sent to the server.

But fragments are used to identify secondary resources; resources embedded within some primary resource.

Consider:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.5

This identifies a secondary resource (specifically, section-3.5) that is included within a primary resource (an HTML representation of RFC 3986). So we "fetch" the secondary resource by first loading the primary resource (the whole RFC) and then use the fragment identifier and HTML processing rules to discover the appropriate element in the document.

The fragment part is strictly a client side concern.

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