In Edward Tufte's classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he coins the term chartjunk to refer to needless visual flourishes that contribute nothing to the effectiveness of an information design in communicating to its audience. These days, our URLs are loaded down with something very similar: long strings of characters that exist only to satisfy some technical constraint, detracting from the effectiveness of our URLs as communication tools. Call it CMSjunk.
[..] The advent of content management systems has been a boon in many ways, but the readability of URLs is not one of them. Databases don't give assets names; instead, they need formulas for retrieving those assets. CMS developers, figuring nobody reads URLs, simply embedded those formulas right there. Sometimes that would manifest itself as just an inscrutable number; at other times, the URL would include a whole string of parameters needed for the CMS to function.
