7 ms·

Google wants to get rid of URLs but doesn’t know what to use instead

34 points by pestkranker 8y ago

giancarlostoro 8y ago
So how can I even link someone to content if this were the case?...
- jtr_47 8y ago
  You'll have to use their "new" version of a URL. Sounds like Google is becoming a bully ;p. They shouldn't reset standards of World Wide Web.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  It seems to me that what they want to get rid of is URL display in the omnibar as identification of the current page, preferring to relegate it got being a machine locator and not the primary exposed content identifier. I'd imagine you'd still keep a UI for extracting a sharing the locator unless whatever friendly identifier was adopted also came with a reliable and widely supported way of recovering the corresponding URL.
josefresco 8y ago
We build websites for small business, many biz owners: - Do not know what or where the "address bar" is. - To visit their website, they will "google" (the verb) their website address (or biz name) - which leads to newly launched website owners thinking their website isn't accessible/online. Chrome and other browsers combining the address bar with the search box has only made this situation worse.
- BillinghamJ 8y ago
  > which leads to newly launched website owners thinking their website isn't accessible I mean, practically, if it doesn't turn up when searched for, it _isn't_ accessible to 99% of the world.
  - tedeh 8y ago
    Completely new sites might take a while to rank, even for the exact keyword/business name.
  - stephenhuey 8y ago
    I hear you, except in reality there are plenty of places a new business might expect users to navigate to their website from, e.g. their URL could be listed in a common proprietary platform such as Yelp or Twitter, and it could also be in a marketing email or even a business card. Hopefully new generations will understand what a URL is, and perhaps some informative campaigns could keep the public aware. We learned how to describe directions around a cute town on a piece of paper when I was in the 2nd grade, so why shouldn't elementary schools teach basic internet essentials to kids at some fairly early grade level?
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    If they're on AdWords, they could be paying dollars-not-cents every time they google themselves and click on the first (paid) link. Just because they're happy to pay the racketeers when a customer does that, doesn't mean they should pay the racketeers even more because of their own poor understanding of browser use.
  - josefresco 8y ago
    I'm talking about 20 minutes to several hours after launch. Also, many won't "google" their website address, but instead their business name. For a newly launched website, many national business directory listings (manta, angies list etc.) will outrank the official site for quite some time.
- romaniv 8y ago
  I've seen a lot of this in business space and it is ridiculous. Business users should be trained/expected to know how to properly use browsers similarly how they are trained/expected to know how to use Word and Excel. This includes a reasonable understanding of URLs. The web is everywhere. It's time to accept that web literacy is necessary for working in an office. This includes things like working with tabs, creating bookmarks and using in-page search.
protoster 8y ago
Arstechnica isn't helping, the title and the article makes it seem like google owns the web and is in charge of the standards.
vorpalhex 8y ago
Maybe instead we can have little badges called "Googs" that'll direct you to the AMP version of a website. Obviously, you'll need to pay the Google for this privilege. They'll make the design open source, but since their browser and Firefox will only support the official "Googs" implementation, oss versions will be dead from the start. Letting a commercial company define a breaking web standard change won't have any repercussions whatsoever.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Sounds like the 2018 equivalent to "Would you like to know more? Just enter AOL Keyword: BAD IDEA"
- staticassertion 8y ago
  Ridiculous strawman.
mscasts 8y ago
Whatever Google comes up with I'm pretty confident that I will disagree heavily with. URLs is fantastic, solves the problem well and basically has little to no issues. There is no need to fix something that is not broken. Thanks, but could you please stop trying to control the web Google?
- edtechdev 8y ago
  Get off https://my.lawn/ https://my.lawn/!
- QuinnyPig 8y ago
  Google knows better than anyone what the world should do—- just ask them. The arrogance coming off of this company is unreal at times.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  It does make sense to me to at least change the pattern to something like protocol://com/domain/subdomain/subdistinction/specificresource and standardize the way these interact with all the parts of the web.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I don't think it makes sense. Most languages read left to right. The thing I'm most concerned with is what specific site I'm on. If I'm on facebook.com, the most important thing to me is "facebook", not "com". So it seems natural to me for that to be on the left.
    - rauhl 8y ago
      The problem is that facebook.com.google-safe-pages.verizonmobile.evil-site.cn also displays the ‘facebook’ portion leftmost. Also, due to the way DNS works you really are trusting ICANN, then the com registrar, then facebook (CAs add an overlay, but then CAs like Let’s Encrypt ultimately trust … DNS). Making that explicit would probably be a good thing (and might even be a first step towards a rootless, decentralised future).
gwbas1c 8y ago
Do we really need to change the url system? What if we make it super-easy to register a TLD? What if there is an alternative system to verify that a website is owned by someone? For example, what if the icon needs to be registered with some kind of trademark-like entity, and the browsers made the icon more prominent?
- eximius 8y ago
  It is super easy to register a tld. Type in the name, add to cart, purchase. Using it is more difficult.
  - 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
    That's for second/third-level domains (depending on the scheme of the TLD they're under). To run a TLD you have to apply to ICANN and provide evidence that you will actually be able to run the registry.
    - eximius 8y ago
      Oh, you're right, I wasn't paying attention. Why would making that easy be a good thing, though? Seems like it would just lead to tld squatting and poor performance .
elicash 8y ago
Given Google hasn't laid out any particular solution and they're still being criticized, it seems to me that HN is so cynical of large tech companies exercising their monopoly power (because of past practices) that they're afraid of any effort to rethink the fundamentals of the web. Which on one level makes sense. It's good to protect things that have made the web great. However, it's also good to maintain a spirit of innovation and willingness to question those things that people assume has to work a certain way just because it's always worked that way. When there's a specific proposal, and if that proposal is a bad one, attack it on the merits. But there are real problems of security and user friendliness when it comes to URLs and I don't see anybody else working on it. Does anybody really think that it's impossible to improve and the way we do things now is exactly the way we should be doing it 100 years from now?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
cat199 8y ago
so, lets see.. we'll need a protocol. and a port. and a host. and then a resource on that host. and to combine them together. how about: foo.html\80:net.host\\:http totally cool!
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  That's innovative! I don't know why we haven't been doing this before! \s
bopbop 8y ago
Similar to the Google push for AMP pages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/ https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/ There's a great comment about the link between these two over there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17923156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17923156
jerf 8y ago
It sounds to me like this is more of a problem with the domain system, and the way it embeds into a URL, than a problem with URLs as a whole. Browsers have already largely hacked off the protocol in the front, and even Google couldn't get rid of the path & querystring (though we can continue to work towards hiding more of it from the average user if that is desirable), so it seems likely this is all about the domain, and the difficulty of mapping what domains really mean to what end users think it means. To boil it down to one example, how do you solve the problem of someone setting up secure.citigroup.accountmanagement.com and have an end-user understand that that's a phishing site? I mean, for goodness' sake, authority in the DNS chain is read backwards. How many users are going to read that and see ".com" as the root and technically most important element, rather than "secure"? I'm not commenting on any possible solution since this article doesn't even sketch one. I'm just trying to apply the principle-of-charity to the article and come up with the most plausible interpretation, and the one most interesting to have a discussion about. My own commentary is that I'm not sure if there is an answer that's any better than beating on domain names until they work as well as possible. The only other alternative I see is a centralized authority of some sort, and while that is likely to potentially work better than what we have now for maybe about 5 years, the negative consequences after that as the central authority learns to spread its wings and exert control to extract money from people and abuse its authority to push some agenda outweigh the safety.
- Retric 8y ago
  Designing a browser to flag high risk domains seems to be a fairly easy though not cheap problem to solve. It's also separate from changing how URL's are defined.
  - jerf 8y ago
    "It's also separate from changing how URL's are defined." URLs, as defined on the web using http and https, specify the use of DNS, which itself brings in a lot of semantics that are not optional. If you fundamentally change how domains are identified on the web, you're going to fundamentally change how HTTP & HTTPS urls are defined, either by rewriting the current definition or putting a new one on the side. Since we're probably playing telephone here, at least two steps removed from the source, it's difficult to tell if they actually want to rewrite what "https://" https://" means, or if perhaps they would create a new protocol ("ghttp://" http://") which would define domains differently. Here's a hyper-quick stab at an example of what that could mean. Imagine a world in which ghttp:Bank of America: { "server_namespace":"accounts", "title":"Account Management", "subhead":"Account Details" } is a legitimate "url" that you could use to link to things. The key here is not in the mere embedding of information, since of course you could translate the literal information contents into a URL no sweat, but that the semantics of ghttp would be redefined to A: change the lookup of "Bank of America" to use Google's home-grown domain-like validation system that is run like the highest-end TLS certificates B: contains a specification of how to render such URLs out in the user agent and C: probably contains all sorts of other exciting things that can go in that JSON blob because why not. Certainly the standard will not be a one-paragraph sketch on HN but run into the hundreds of pages, because that's how these things go. One of the benefits, for instance, might be sold as making it easier to parse the URL with a JSON library than bashing regexes together as we do now, which is incredibly error-prone, speaking as one who has made many errors myself. Technically, that's still a URL, if you ignore the newlines I added for clarity. It turns out that if you read the standard, there's nothing about URLs containing DNS-based domain names; that's a specific detail of HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and several other schemes, but not technically a characteristic of a URL in general. So I would consider it a valid interpretation of the article (which, as I said, is rather vague) to say that what is meant by "redefine URL" is "redefine the set of URLs that user agents are used to using" and that Google may want to create a new protocol scheme. It's also faintly possible they want to actually redefine "https://" https://" itself, but, while there's technically room to do that in some sense, I don't think it will succeed.
DelightOne 8y ago
Navigation is the problem. Maybe go back to lists and hierarchies of lists like the old days. With `UUID` behind it. Lists are at least navigatable. So every URL would be part of at least one list and `URLs` point to lists. Or something like that. Example: Sites-I-Use List can be shown in the address-bar instead of the url as green while a site I never used before can be shown as red. That’s not even taking organization into account, or all the other myriad of useful usecases.
- djstein 8y ago
  whoa there, let's not talk about sense
  - DelightOne 8y ago
    So its a bad idea? Well, at least its mine. Anyway how often have you used URLs list-like?! And how often have you used Google(which offers List by Search)?
    - djstein 8y ago
      I should have added an /s
s_dev 8y ago
Is the implication that they want us all to use AMP?
lcnmrn 8y ago
Browsers should only reable URLs, that means GET parameters shouldn't work.
romaniv 8y ago
>"Some URLs are good for sharing, others aren't." This is one of the things that definitely can be improved on. Having something either in the URL or in page metadata to say "this is linkable". This doesn't warrant a replacement, however.
jiveturkey 8y ago
RealPaths (TM) (ref to Real Names, for those not old enough to remember)
lbriner 8y ago
I'm not sure URLs have any major downsides. The full complexity is beyond most people but most people don't need to understand anything more than how to type www.something.com, it is the web application owner who has to understand them and where most security problems live. Security is only a problem if the server or web application have not been setup correctly. It's no different than visiting a shop or a house where you should be able to expect certain regulations to be met (insurance, building codes etc) and I can see more countries starting to enforce country-wide codes for web sites, annual checks, registrations, whatever for people to be allowed to trade in that country.
souterrain 8y ago
It's a bit disingenuous ars technica ledes with a screenshot of a homograph attack that Chrome mitigated in March 2017, and really doesn't relate to the article. https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/ https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/
otakucode 8y ago
Welp, time to be afraid then. Google does not wait to find a replacement when they don't like something. They destroy first, and then never get around to coming up with anything to replace it. So get ready to embrace a future with no address bar and with Google search being the only way to find and navigate to pages. Just look at what they did with vertical side tabs in Chrome for a perfect example. Google said they "didn't like how it looked" and "wanted to find a better solution" so, despite the option being a hidden setting you had to dig to even find and enable, they ripped it out of the browser. And to this day, years later, there is no solution at all to having lots of tabs open. The browser just rapidly fills the bar with tabs, shrinking them to utter uselessness. But at least Google doesn't have to tolerate something they find aesthetically displeasing.
TotempaaltJ 8y ago
It makes a lot of sense to me to redesign how we display URLs. Right now, we show them as a singular identifier, where the only thing we can tell the user is to search for things inside that string of characters (look for https, or look for bankname.com). We don't need to show the whole string of characters. It seems very sensible to me to take the URL for what it is and communicate that back to the user: - The protocol doesn't matter much to most people, except the implications it has, so maybe show "encrypted" or "not encrypted" (and fallback to protocol name for FTP and the like, most people won't ever touch that without knowing what it is) - The domain is interesting: there's the TLD, which doesn't _really_ matter, and the second level name, which matters a lot. Subdomains matter less. How about we show it as a much more prominent "[ domain.com ]" with a less obvious subdomain. - Paths are pretty generic all around: incrementally deeper descriptors separated by forward slashes. Could definitely show that as a breadcrumbs-style thing (might also make people care more about readable paths, which is nice). - The query string should probably be shown as "tags" with a key and value, since that's what they are. - The hash is a bit icky, but it might be enough to highlight that you're linking to a place in the page. Could be displayed as something like this: https://i.imgur.com/RfJoP23.png https://i.imgur.com/RfJoP23.png
dstroot 8y ago
The “World Wide Web” was based on only three concepts. A document markup language, an document “universal resource location” (URL), and a tool that could use the URL to retrieve the document and render the markup. Breaking/obfuscating/demoting the URL is so fundamental I am shocked it would even be suggested.
shawnlower2 8y ago
Half-baked idea: replace it with the x509 subject? The route could be displayed less prominently to the right. Preserve normal omnibar behavior for input.
zelon88 8y ago
"...go to www dot COMPANY dot com, or AOL keyword COMPANY..."
OisinMoran 8y ago
I'm a bit late to the party here, and the following doesn't address a lot of the concerns in the article (nor does it actually get rid of URLs), but for anyone interested in alternatives to horribly long URLs or incredibly opaque URL shorteners I made a fun little tool [0]. It's called ShortestSearch and in essence could be looked at as a reverse Google in that you give Google search terms and it gives you a list of websites, but for ShortestSearch you give it a website and it gives you a list of search terms. All with the aim to perfect the art of "It should be the first result if you Google 'x y z' ". Also found the part of the article where it describes its own URL strangely enjoyable. [0] https://oisinmoran.com/ShortestSearch/ https://oisinmoran.com/ShortestSearch/

34 points by pestkranker 8y ago

giancarlostoro 8y ago

So how can I even link someone to content if this were the case?...

jtr_47 8y ago
You'll have to use their "new" version of a URL. Sounds like Google is becoming a bully ;p. They shouldn't reset standards of World Wide Web.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 8y ago
It seems to me that what they want to get rid of is URL display in the omnibar as identification of the current page, preferring to relegate it got being a machine locator and not the primary exposed content identifier. I'd imagine you'd still keep a UI for extracting a sharing the locator unless whatever friendly identifier was adopted also came with a reliable and widely supported way of recovering the corresponding URL.

josefresco 8y ago

We build websites for small business, many biz owners: - Do not know what or where the "address bar" is. - To visit their website, they will "google" (the verb) their website address (or biz name) - which leads to newly launched website owners thinking their website isn't accessible/online. Chrome and other browsers combining the address bar with the search box has only made this situation worse.

BillinghamJ 8y ago
> which leads to newly launched website owners thinking their website isn't accessible I mean, practically, if it doesn't turn up when searched for, it _isn't_ accessible to 99% of the world.
- tedeh 8y ago
  Completely new sites might take a while to rank, even for the exact keyword/business name.
- stephenhuey 8y ago
  I hear you, except in reality there are plenty of places a new business might expect users to navigate to their website from, e.g. their URL could be listed in a common proprietary platform such as Yelp or Twitter, and it could also be in a marketing email or even a business card. Hopefully new generations will understand what a URL is, and perhaps some informative campaigns could keep the public aware. We learned how to describe directions around a cute town on a piece of paper when I was in the 2nd grade, so why shouldn't elementary schools teach basic internet essentials to kids at some fairly early grade level?
- jessaustin 8y ago
  If they're on AdWords, they could be paying dollars-not-cents every time they google themselves and click on the first (paid) link. Just because they're happy to pay the racketeers when a customer does that, doesn't mean they should pay the racketeers even more because of their own poor understanding of browser use.
- josefresco 8y ago
  I'm talking about 20 minutes to several hours after launch. Also, many won't "google" their website address, but instead their business name. For a newly launched website, many national business directory listings (manta, angies list etc.) will outrank the official site for quite some time.
romaniv 8y ago
I've seen a lot of this in business space and it is ridiculous. Business users should be trained/expected to know how to properly use browsers similarly how they are trained/expected to know how to use Word and Excel. This includes a reasonable understanding of URLs. The web is everywhere. It's time to accept that web literacy is necessary for working in an office. This includes things like working with tabs, creating bookmarks and using in-page search.

protoster 8y ago

Arstechnica isn't helping, the title and the article makes it seem like google owns the web and is in charge of the standards.

vorpalhex 8y ago

Maybe instead we can have little badges called "Googs" that'll direct you to the AMP version of a website. Obviously, you'll need to pay the Google for this privilege. They'll make the design open source, but since their browser and Firefox will only support the official "Googs" implementation, oss versions will be dead from the start. Letting a commercial company define a breaking web standard change won't have any repercussions whatsoever.

Spooky23 8y ago
Sounds like the 2018 equivalent to "Would you like to know more? Just enter AOL Keyword: BAD IDEA"
staticassertion 8y ago
Ridiculous strawman.

mscasts 8y ago

Whatever Google comes up with I'm pretty confident that I will disagree heavily with. URLs is fantastic, solves the problem well and basically has little to no issues. There is no need to fix something that is not broken. Thanks, but could you please stop trying to control the web Google?

edtechdev 8y ago
Get off https://my.lawn/ https://my.lawn/!
QuinnyPig 8y ago
Google knows better than anyone what the world should do—- just ask them. The arrogance coming off of this company is unreal at times.
ashelmire 8y ago
It does make sense to me to at least change the pattern to something like protocol://com/domain/subdomain/subdistinction/specificresource and standardize the way these interact with all the parts of the web.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I don't think it makes sense. Most languages read left to right. The thing I'm most concerned with is what specific site I'm on. If I'm on facebook.com, the most important thing to me is "facebook", not "com". So it seems natural to me for that to be on the left.
  - rauhl 8y ago
    The problem is that facebook.com.google-safe-pages.verizonmobile.evil-site.cn also displays the ‘facebook’ portion leftmost. Also, due to the way DNS works you really are trusting ICANN, then the com registrar, then facebook (CAs add an overlay, but then CAs like Let’s Encrypt ultimately trust … DNS). Making that explicit would probably be a good thing (and might even be a first step towards a rootless, decentralised future).

gwbas1c 8y ago

Do we really need to change the url system? What if we make it super-easy to register a TLD? What if there is an alternative system to verify that a website is owned by someone? For example, what if the icon needs to be registered with some kind of trademark-like entity, and the browsers made the icon more prominent?

eximius 8y ago
It is super easy to register a tld. Type in the name, add to cart, purchase. Using it is more difficult.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  That's for second/third-level domains (depending on the scheme of the TLD they're under). To run a TLD you have to apply to ICANN and provide evidence that you will actually be able to run the registry.
  - eximius 8y ago
    Oh, you're right, I wasn't paying attention. Why would making that easy be a good thing, though? Seems like it would just lead to tld squatting and poor performance .

elicash 8y ago

Given Google hasn't laid out any particular solution and they're still being criticized, it seems to me that HN is so cynical of large tech companies exercising their monopoly power (because of past practices) that they're afraid of any effort to rethink the fundamentals of the web. Which on one level makes sense. It's good to protect things that have made the web great. However, it's also good to maintain a spirit of innovation and willingness to question those things that people assume has to work a certain way just because it's always worked that way. When there's a specific proposal, and if that proposal is a bad one, attack it on the merits. But there are real problems of security and user friendliness when it comes to URLs and I don't see anybody else working on it. Does anybody really think that it's impossible to improve and the way we do things now is exactly the way we should be doing it 100 years from now?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

cat199 8y ago

so, lets see.. we'll need a protocol. and a port. and a host. and then a resource on that host. and to combine them together. how about: foo.html\80:net.host\\:http totally cool!

theandrewbailey 8y ago
That's innovative! I don't know why we haven't been doing this before! \s

bopbop 8y ago

Similar to the Google push for AMP pages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/ https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/ There's a great comment about the link between these two over there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17923156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17923156

jerf 8y ago

It sounds to me like this is more of a problem with the domain system, and the way it embeds into a URL, than a problem with URLs as a whole. Browsers have already largely hacked off the protocol in the front, and even Google couldn't get rid of the path & querystring (though we can continue to work towards hiding more of it from the average user if that is desirable), so it seems likely this is all about the domain, and the difficulty of mapping what domains really mean to what end users think it means. To boil it down to one example, how do you solve the problem of someone setting up secure.citigroup.accountmanagement.com and have an end-user understand that that's a phishing site? I mean, for goodness' sake, authority in the DNS chain is read backwards. How many users are going to read that and see ".com" as the root and technically most important element, rather than "secure"? I'm not commenting on any possible solution since this article doesn't even sketch one. I'm just trying to apply the principle-of-charity to the article and come up with the most plausible interpretation, and the one most interesting to have a discussion about. My own commentary is that I'm not sure if there is an answer that's any better than beating on domain names until they work as well as possible. The only other alternative I see is a centralized authority of some sort, and while that is likely to potentially work better than what we have now for maybe about 5 years, the negative consequences after that as the central authority learns to spread its wings and exert control to extract money from people and abuse its authority to push some agenda outweigh the safety.

Retric 8y ago
Designing a browser to flag high risk domains seems to be a fairly easy though not cheap problem to solve. It's also separate from changing how URL's are defined.
- jerf 8y ago
  "It's also separate from changing how URL's are defined." URLs, as defined on the web using http and https, specify the use of DNS, which itself brings in a lot of semantics that are not optional. If you fundamentally change how domains are identified on the web, you're going to fundamentally change how HTTP & HTTPS urls are defined, either by rewriting the current definition or putting a new one on the side. Since we're probably playing telephone here, at least two steps removed from the source, it's difficult to tell if they actually want to rewrite what "https://" https://" means, or if perhaps they would create a new protocol ("ghttp://" http://") which would define domains differently. Here's a hyper-quick stab at an example of what that could mean. Imagine a world in which ghttp:Bank of America: { "server_namespace":"accounts", "title":"Account Management", "subhead":"Account Details" } is a legitimate "url" that you could use to link to things. The key here is not in the mere embedding of information, since of course you could translate the literal information contents into a URL no sweat, but that the semantics of ghttp would be redefined to A: change the lookup of "Bank of America" to use Google's home-grown domain-like validation system that is run like the highest-end TLS certificates B: contains a specification of how to render such URLs out in the user agent and C: probably contains all sorts of other exciting things that can go in that JSON blob because why not. Certainly the standard will not be a one-paragraph sketch on HN but run into the hundreds of pages, because that's how these things go. One of the benefits, for instance, might be sold as making it easier to parse the URL with a JSON library than bashing regexes together as we do now, which is incredibly error-prone, speaking as one who has made many errors myself. Technically, that's still a URL, if you ignore the newlines I added for clarity. It turns out that if you read the standard, there's nothing about URLs containing DNS-based domain names; that's a specific detail of HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and several other schemes, but not technically a characteristic of a URL in general. So I would consider it a valid interpretation of the article (which, as I said, is rather vague) to say that what is meant by "redefine URL" is "redefine the set of URLs that user agents are used to using" and that Google may want to create a new protocol scheme. It's also faintly possible they want to actually redefine "https://" https://" itself, but, while there's technically room to do that in some sense, I don't think it will succeed.

DelightOne 8y ago

Navigation is the problem. Maybe go back to lists and hierarchies of lists like the old days. With `UUID` behind it. Lists are at least navigatable. So every URL would be part of at least one list and `URLs` point to lists. Or something like that. Example: Sites-I-Use List can be shown in the address-bar instead of the url as green while a site I never used before can be shown as red. That’s not even taking organization into account, or all the other myriad of useful usecases.

djstein 8y ago
whoa there, let's not talk about sense
- DelightOne 8y ago
  So its a bad idea? Well, at least its mine. Anyway how often have you used URLs list-like?! And how often have you used Google(which offers List by Search)?
  - djstein 8y ago
    I should have added an /s

s_dev 8y ago

Is the implication that they want us all to use AMP?

lcnmrn 8y ago

Browsers should only reable URLs, that means GET parameters shouldn't work.

romaniv 8y ago

>"Some URLs are good for sharing, others aren't." This is one of the things that definitely can be improved on. Having something either in the URL or in page metadata to say "this is linkable". This doesn't warrant a replacement, however.

jiveturkey 8y ago

RealPaths (TM) (ref to Real Names, for those not old enough to remember)

lbriner 8y ago

I'm not sure URLs have any major downsides. The full complexity is beyond most people but most people don't need to understand anything more than how to type www.something.com, it is the web application owner who has to understand them and where most security problems live. Security is only a problem if the server or web application have not been setup correctly. It's no different than visiting a shop or a house where you should be able to expect certain regulations to be met (insurance, building codes etc) and I can see more countries starting to enforce country-wide codes for web sites, annual checks, registrations, whatever for people to be allowed to trade in that country.

souterrain 8y ago

It's a bit disingenuous ars technica ledes with a screenshot of a homograph attack that Chrome mitigated in March 2017, and really doesn't relate to the article. https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/ https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/

otakucode 8y ago

Welp, time to be afraid then. Google does not wait to find a replacement when they don't like something. They destroy first, and then never get around to coming up with anything to replace it. So get ready to embrace a future with no address bar and with Google search being the only way to find and navigate to pages. Just look at what they did with vertical side tabs in Chrome for a perfect example. Google said they "didn't like how it looked" and "wanted to find a better solution" so, despite the option being a hidden setting you had to dig to even find and enable, they ripped it out of the browser. And to this day, years later, there is no solution at all to having lots of tabs open. The browser just rapidly fills the bar with tabs, shrinking them to utter uselessness. But at least Google doesn't have to tolerate something they find aesthetically displeasing.

TotempaaltJ 8y ago

It makes a lot of sense to me to redesign how we display URLs. Right now, we show them as a singular identifier, where the only thing we can tell the user is to search for things inside that string of characters (look for https, or look for bankname.com). We don't need to show the whole string of characters. It seems very sensible to me to take the URL for what it is and communicate that back to the user: - The protocol doesn't matter much to most people, except the implications it has, so maybe show "encrypted" or "not encrypted" (and fallback to protocol name for FTP and the like, most people won't ever touch that without knowing what it is) - The domain is interesting: there's the TLD, which doesn't _really_ matter, and the second level name, which matters a lot. Subdomains matter less. How about we show it as a much more prominent "[ domain.com ]" with a less obvious subdomain. - Paths are pretty generic all around: incrementally deeper descriptors separated by forward slashes. Could definitely show that as a breadcrumbs-style thing (might also make people care more about readable paths, which is nice). - The query string should probably be shown as "tags" with a key and value, since that's what they are. - The hash is a bit icky, but it might be enough to highlight that you're linking to a place in the page. Could be displayed as something like this: https://i.imgur.com/RfJoP23.png https://i.imgur.com/RfJoP23.png

dstroot 8y ago

The “World Wide Web” was based on only three concepts. A document markup language, an document “universal resource location” (URL), and a tool that could use the URL to retrieve the document and render the markup. Breaking/obfuscating/demoting the URL is so fundamental I am shocked it would even be suggested.

shawnlower2 8y ago

Half-baked idea: replace it with the x509 subject? The route could be displayed less prominently to the right. Preserve normal omnibar behavior for input.

zelon88 8y ago

"...go to www dot COMPANY dot com, or AOL keyword COMPANY..."

OisinMoran 8y ago

I'm a bit late to the party here, and the following doesn't address a lot of the concerns in the article (nor does it actually get rid of URLs), but for anyone interested in alternatives to horribly long URLs or incredibly opaque URL shorteners I made a fun little tool [0]. It's called ShortestSearch and in essence could be looked at as a reverse Google in that you give Google search terms and it gives you a list of websites, but for ShortestSearch you give it a website and it gives you a list of search terms. All with the aim to perfect the art of "It should be the first result if you Google 'x y z' ". Also found the part of the article where it describes its own URL strangely enjoyable. [0] https://oisinmoran.com/ShortestSearch/ https://oisinmoran.com/ShortestSearch/