title: Why are there two different URL formats for Google spreadsheet documents?
body: <p>My app accesses private Google spreadsheet documents on behalf of an authorized user.  It seems that Google's API expects developers to first request a list of all the spreadsheet documents available to  an authorized user before they can get at a particular spreadsheet's keys.  I wanted to find a workaround to this, and eventually did by extracting the <code>key</code> parameter value from URLs spreadsheet URLs that look like this:</p>
  
  <p><code>https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key={some long key here}&amp;usp=drive_web#gid=0</code></p>
  
  <p>It was simple enough to just break down the string to point where I could retrieve <code>key</code>'s value fairly easy without the need of a regex.</p>
  
  <p>Recently, though I don't know how recent, I notice URLs to newly created Google Drive spreadsheets come in this form:</p>
  
  <p><code>https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{some long key here}/edit#gid=0</code></p>
  
  <p>I was also able to extract the key from this URL string, but am just curious about the difference between the two URLs:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What is the significance between the two URLs.</li>
  <li>Why does Google's API force devs to first get a list of all available docs, when a dev might just want to extract a key from a direct URL to a Google Drive spreadsheet doc.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>