7 ms·

Something I haven't seen anyone here bring up yet: many URLs are meaningless to humans past the domain. For an example, look at the top of this page. The only s

Something I haven't seen anyone here bring up yet: many URLs are meaningless to humans past the domain. For an example, look at the top of this page. The only semantic meaning in the URL for this post is `news.ycombinator.com`. The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human. (But, of course, meaningful to HN's backend.) A lot of (most?) of the URLs on the web are not semantic. They're naked application look-ups. I claim that for this current page, there's no meaningful loss of information by just showing the domain. But some URLs are semantic. I think losing those would lose useful information for human readers. If we could perfectly know which URLs have useful semantic information for users and which don't, and then only present those with full semantic meaning, I wouldn't mind much. Main point: I see people saying things like "these designers think people are too stupid to understand URLS." But that ignores that some URLs are not actually meaningful to anyone. Anticipated responses: 1. You are losing information by taking off the "application lookup" part: the information that an application lookup was made. Fair enough. But I claim it's a small loss. 2. We can never perfectly separate out the URLs with useful semantic information. Which, also probably true. But I think we can do a decent job, and as long as the full URL is present when I mouse-over it, I probably wouldn't object.

ArmandGrillet 6y ago
"many URLs are meaningless": many, but not important ones such as URLs from Reddit and GitHub.
- scott_s 6y ago
  Excellent point. But the information I want before going to a URL is different from the information I want while there. But if we could reliably separate the two, I don't think I would object to this kind of a UI change in principle.
Mathnerd314 6y ago
The 24156986 is semantic though; the ids are assigned sequentially to submissions. Early submissions have tiny ids like 495. So they are at least as meaningful as bug tracker ID's or version numbers. Now, it is true that version numbers etc. could be more meaningful. Jeff Atwood wrote an old article about the "infinite version" in Chrome, where the version number basically doesn't matter until you're checking to see if you're up-to-date. Personally I've switched to using dates / times in my ID's. HN could do that too; an ID like 2020-08-14-10-12-13-99 is longer than the current ID's but not by much. But overall it seems hard to draw a line in the sand where dates are semantic and version numbers aren't.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  That's still not semantic though, hn isn't a linear log. It's a tree. Linking to comments by I'd isn't really useful
avodonosov 6y ago
item?id=24156986 is readable and meaningful
- bootlooped 6y ago
  Not to laypeople. Most people have no idea what query params are, or even what part of the url the top level domain is. You can explain what they are easily, but it still wouldn't be useful to laypeople. What can my mom do with "item?id=24156986"? Outside of developing something that interfaces with HN, I don't know what I would do with that info either.
  - emptyparadise 6y ago
    A layperson wouldn't know what the "7394" in "7394 Foobar Road" means or why "Foobar Road" is a road called "Foobar" but that does not mean we should give Google the right to eliminate street addresses. A URL is an address. All your mom needs to know is that if she goes to https://news.ycombimator.com/item?id=24156986 https://news.ycombimator.com/item?id=24156986, she will end up at something and she will be able to come back to it later, that's what's useful about it. And besides, there are URLs that are semantically useful, such as reddit's "u/username" or "r/subreddit" schemes. Of course, the URL is being assaulted from two other fronts, with websites turning into single page apps and with social networks constantly making it difficult to share URLs.
    - anchpop 6y ago
      The average person knows exactly what the "7384" means, they understand it as a number that uniquely identifies a house along that street
      - benrbray 6y ago
        The average person knows that a URL is a string that (for all intents and purposes) uniquely identifies a web page on the internet. There are some cases, like with Facebook/Google/YouTube, where they add a bunch of tracking info onto the URL, obscuring which segments of the URL are optional vs. required. But I think that's exactly the point, isn't it? To make it a lot less noticeable when you're being tracked. This change will enable a lot of URL funnybusiness that harms users.
freedomben 6y ago
I don't agree at all that the URL is meaningless to humans. If I want my friend to read this page, I copy the link and send it to him. That ID above is clearly the comment page ID. I don't have to see the backend code to know that. I'm certainly not an average user, but I am a human. The URL on nearly every site gives me all sorts of information.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  this change to the browser doesn't prevent you from copying and pasting. The URL reveals itself when you put focus in the location bar.
- xeromal 6y ago
  Yeah, but you're going to copy that URL to your buddy. You're not going to read it out to him.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    You'd be surprised how often people read URLs to one another over the phone.
    - notatoad 6y ago
      i would be very surprised. in my days doing tech support, i quickly learned that this was a completely fruitless exercise as a huge number of people have no idea how to use the URL bar in their browser. they know how to use google, and can click links that are emailed to them or shortcuts in their browser, but simply do not know how to navigate to a URL (even a path-less one). i could usually tell somebody "go to google" or "click this link", but "go to <my company's website>" was met with confusion.
      - luckman212 6y ago
        And lord help you if your domain didn't end with ".com" — endless hours of fun trying to compel them NOT to type "acme.net.com" :(
kobe_bryant 6y ago
this site is fine since these are submissions but its so satisfying when you can just edit parts of the url and go directly to the date and category you want
Qub3d 6y ago
I like Firefox's current strategy of making the root domain brightly-colored and the rest of the url less-so.
worble 6y ago
>The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human Removing Url's is throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. Take Stack Overflow for an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536/vue-test-utils-how-to-test-a-router-push https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536/vue-test-utils-... The only thing you need to actually get to the question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536, but they intentionally add an extra human readable section for laypeople. If google actually cared about making the internet a better place, they would simply rank human readable urls higher than non-human readable ones.
- bzb4 6y ago
  That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    It's more complex than that. Google upweights it because text in the URL is assumed to be significant to the user. So it's a bit of both, really. It would be a shame if URL text loses its SEO value because it's getting hidden. Slugs in the url are human-friendly and should be encouraged.
  - sah2ed 6y ago
    > That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google. It is indeed for humans. After all, the whole purpose of SEO is to show up on the 1st or 2nd SRP for web searches conducted by humans.
    - baby 6y ago
      Not for humans browsing the site currently (which is the distinction that matters)
  - rchaud 6y ago
    The URL structure is usually mirrored on the actual website by way of clickable breadcrumbs or as navigational information architecture. People understand slashes indicate folders and directories, even though database-driven CMSes do not use folder structures. They can figure out that they can go one level from from "example.com/cars/toyota" by removing the "/toyota"
gravitas 6y ago
> For an example, look at the top of this page. The only semantic meaning in the URL for this post is `news.ycombinator.com`. The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human. I agree, but I'm going to say the unpopular thing: HN has problems and is an archaic design from the past, and this issue is due to the proliferation of changing the titles of posts (thereby breaking a vanity URL) or changing the URL that the story points at to some other website. Using a vanity URL doesn't work for how the owners run this website and its my belief that it's in the minority along with forum (phpBB e.g.) websites and does not represent the larger percentage of the internet using vanity URLs with human readable text strings in them.
- rsanek 6y ago
  It easily could, even with title changes -- just keep a history of them and redirect to the latest title. Dropbox Paper does this pretty well.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
As an example of semantic URLs, think of Wikipedia articles (ironically, featured in the article). The URL tells you directly what you're reading about. Why is it useful to show it in full? Because page titles are no longer visible during usual browsing sessions - they're shown in tab headers, which means in practice, you only get to see a favicon and maybe a word of the title if you're not a tab hoarder. So once you've scrolled halfway through a large article, the URL bar serves as the indicator of what you're actually reading. The same applies to news sites, magazines, blogs, Reddit, social media sites - which is quite likely the majority of browsing done by normal people.
- spankalee 6y ago
  I think you've identified some meaningful next steps to try after highlighting that the origin is the most significant part of the URL. Maybe the omnibox space can show the page title?
  - paledot 6y ago
    <title>https ://totally-your-bank.com/</title>
codingdave 6y ago
It isn't meaningless to all humans - we get screenshots sent in to our support team all the time, and even if the end user doesn't know what the URL means, the support team does. That quickly lets them recreate problems, find bad data, and give the devs enough information to reproduce bugs.
berkes 6y ago
/r/webdev disagrees.
wwweston 6y ago
> many URLs are meaningless to humans past the domain. I'd argue this confuses meaningful with degrees of legibility. And also that it ignores how certain significant margins of users do learn this stuff. `item?id=24156986` is immediately meaningful at least at one level: you know at some level you're looking at a specific item resource under the domain news.ycombinator.com. Processing which one requires a lot more attention and you're probably not going to build up a mental directory of corresponding numbers with discussions, and so that particular meaning passes beyond the threshold of legibility, but that doesn't mean the number itself is meaningless, anyone who's made a habit of paying attention to URLs knows what it is, just not that final layer of correspondence. And it is not just web developers who know this stuff. I've seen laypeople who are just longtime browser users who have a pretty good idea how URLs like these work, not because anyone formally taught them how paths and query strings are spec'd, but just because the affordance of the URL bar is there and they've seen enough URLs correlated with browsing behavior to learn it by observance/association. The same way most people pick up language itself. The URL bar teaches some people who care to notice how URLs work, which makes URLs work better as a social tech. And it doesn't require anyone who doesn't care to do so. We lose that if we remove it. It's not a small loss.
- baby 6y ago
  I think these are the only meaningful usecases: - differentiating homepage from not-homepage - differentiating subdomains when folder structure is used instead of a subdomain
cryptonector 6y ago
While many URLs are not designed for human consumption, many are, and many users are "trained" to some degree to understand them. But most importantly, users need some visual (or auditory, if sight-impaired) cue as to what kind of site their on, what domain at the very least. That's why HN puts the domainname of the authority of any posted links next to the title. Regarding URLs that are not designed for human consumption, if they can possibly land in the status bar, then that's on their designers. Yes, of course, that's exactly what malicious players will do: design URLs that users can't parse -- but that's no reason to hide the bar altogether, but rather to hide parts of the URL (e.g., the scheme, the credentials, maybe the fragment, the query, even the path -- everything but the authority).
feanaro 6y ago
> If we could perfectly know which URLs have useful semantic information for users and which don't, and then only present those with full semantic meaning, I wouldn't mind much. That's a very large if, IMO. We cannot do this, practically speaking. Even in semantically meaningless URLs like the one in your example, there is still an important part of semantics retained and that is identity. By having the URL available you can at least compare two URLs and judge whether they are the same URL or not. Additionally, there is a 1-to-1 association between URL and content: for each unique URL, you get some unique content. I agree there might be some UX improvement possible here, but faced with the looming threat of Google AMP, it's not a time to twiddle our thumbs and idly fantasize about this without a complete and robust plan on how this improvement might be done. I also think that by hiding the URL we will make ordinary users even more ignorant about how the web works. It will truly appear like magic, since they will see identical strings in the URL bar yet they will be served different content. How does this even work? No one knows! Expect users that won't even know how to copy a link to someone.
notatoad 6y ago
not only are some URLs meaningless, they can in some cases be intentionally misleading. by hiding the non-domain portion of the URL, google is showing the only actual authoritative information contained in the URL: what site is hosting the page.
arendtio 6y ago
But then again, you could argue, that URLs are meaningless to people. They are just some weird text and have neither face nor voice. I am not sure what google tries to accomplish with those changes. Somehow it feels like some UX designer has made this his personal vendetta. Didn't they try it already some months ago and got pretty clear feedback? If this is about phishing, who established the theory, that people who don't understand URLs, understand how phishing works and that even the slightest deviation in a domain is dangerous?
- tripzilch 6y ago
  > I am not sure what google tries to accomplish with those changes. I think it's about the ways people can and do navigate the web. It's something you don't need if you navigate the web just via Google, so they get rid of it.

ArmandGrillet 6y ago

"many URLs are meaningless": many, but not important ones such as URLs from Reddit and GitHub.

scott_s 6y ago
Excellent point. But the information I want before going to a URL is different from the information I want while there. But if we could reliably separate the two, I don't think I would object to this kind of a UI change in principle.

Mathnerd314 6y ago

The 24156986 is semantic though; the ids are assigned sequentially to submissions. Early submissions have tiny ids like 495. So they are at least as meaningful as bug tracker ID's or version numbers. Now, it is true that version numbers etc. could be more meaningful. Jeff Atwood wrote an old article about the "infinite version" in Chrome, where the version number basically doesn't matter until you're checking to see if you're up-to-date. Personally I've switched to using dates / times in my ID's. HN could do that too; an ID like 2020-08-14-10-12-13-99 is longer than the current ID's but not by much. But overall it seems hard to draw a line in the sand where dates are semantic and version numbers aren't.

joshuamorton 6y ago
That's still not semantic though, hn isn't a linear log. It's a tree. Linking to comments by I'd isn't really useful

avodonosov 6y ago

item?id=24156986 is readable and meaningful

bootlooped 6y ago
Not to laypeople. Most people have no idea what query params are, or even what part of the url the top level domain is. You can explain what they are easily, but it still wouldn't be useful to laypeople. What can my mom do with "item?id=24156986"? Outside of developing something that interfaces with HN, I don't know what I would do with that info either.
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  A layperson wouldn't know what the "7394" in "7394 Foobar Road" means or why "Foobar Road" is a road called "Foobar" but that does not mean we should give Google the right to eliminate street addresses. A URL is an address. All your mom needs to know is that if she goes to https://news.ycombimator.com/item?id=24156986 https://news.ycombimator.com/item?id=24156986, she will end up at something and she will be able to come back to it later, that's what's useful about it. And besides, there are URLs that are semantically useful, such as reddit's "u/username" or "r/subreddit" schemes. Of course, the URL is being assaulted from two other fronts, with websites turning into single page apps and with social networks constantly making it difficult to share URLs.
  - anchpop 6y ago
    The average person knows exactly what the "7384" means, they understand it as a number that uniquely identifies a house along that street
    - benrbray 6y ago
      The average person knows that a URL is a string that (for all intents and purposes) uniquely identifies a web page on the internet. There are some cases, like with Facebook/Google/YouTube, where they add a bunch of tracking info onto the URL, obscuring which segments of the URL are optional vs. required. But I think that's exactly the point, isn't it? To make it a lot less noticeable when you're being tracked. This change will enable a lot of URL funnybusiness that harms users.

freedomben 6y ago

I don't agree at all that the URL is meaningless to humans. If I want my friend to read this page, I copy the link and send it to him. That ID above is clearly the comment page ID. I don't have to see the backend code to know that. I'm certainly not an average user, but I am a human. The URL on nearly every site gives me all sorts of information.

bagacrap 6y ago
this change to the browser doesn't prevent you from copying and pasting. The URL reveals itself when you put focus in the location bar.
xeromal 6y ago
Yeah, but you're going to copy that URL to your buddy. You're not going to read it out to him.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  You'd be surprised how often people read URLs to one another over the phone.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    i would be very surprised. in my days doing tech support, i quickly learned that this was a completely fruitless exercise as a huge number of people have no idea how to use the URL bar in their browser. they know how to use google, and can click links that are emailed to them or shortcuts in their browser, but simply do not know how to navigate to a URL (even a path-less one). i could usually tell somebody "go to google" or "click this link", but "go to <my company's website>" was met with confusion.
    - luckman212 6y ago
      And lord help you if your domain didn't end with ".com" — endless hours of fun trying to compel them NOT to type "acme.net.com" :(

kobe_bryant 6y ago

this site is fine since these are submissions but its so satisfying when you can just edit parts of the url and go directly to the date and category you want

Qub3d 6y ago

I like Firefox's current strategy of making the root domain brightly-colored and the rest of the url less-so.

worble 6y ago

>The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human Removing Url's is throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. Take Stack Overflow for an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536/vue-test-utils-how-to-test-a-router-push https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536/vue-test-utils-... The only thing you need to actually get to the question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536, but they intentionally add an extra human readable section for laypeople. If google actually cared about making the internet a better place, they would simply rank human readable urls higher than non-human readable ones.

bzb4 6y ago
That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  It's more complex than that. Google upweights it because text in the URL is assumed to be significant to the user. So it's a bit of both, really. It would be a shame if URL text loses its SEO value because it's getting hidden. Slugs in the url are human-friendly and should be encouraged.
- sah2ed 6y ago
  > That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google. It is indeed for humans. After all, the whole purpose of SEO is to show up on the 1st or 2nd SRP for web searches conducted by humans.
  - baby 6y ago
    Not for humans browsing the site currently (which is the distinction that matters)
- rchaud 6y ago
  The URL structure is usually mirrored on the actual website by way of clickable breadcrumbs or as navigational information architecture. People understand slashes indicate folders and directories, even though database-driven CMSes do not use folder structures. They can figure out that they can go one level from from "example.com/cars/toyota" by removing the "/toyota"

gravitas 6y ago

> For an example, look at the top of this page. The only semantic meaning in the URL for this post is `news.ycombinator.com`. The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human. I agree, but I'm going to say the unpopular thing: HN has problems and is an archaic design from the past, and this issue is due to the proliferation of changing the titles of posts (thereby breaking a vanity URL) or changing the URL that the story points at to some other website. Using a vanity URL doesn't work for how the owners run this website and its my belief that it's in the minority along with forum (phpBB e.g.) websites and does not represent the larger percentage of the internet using vanity URLs with human readable text strings in them.

rsanek 6y ago
It easily could, even with title changes -- just keep a history of them and redirect to the latest title. Dropbox Paper does this pretty well.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

As an example of semantic URLs, think of Wikipedia articles (ironically, featured in the article). The URL tells you directly what you're reading about. Why is it useful to show it in full? Because page titles are no longer visible during usual browsing sessions - they're shown in tab headers, which means in practice, you only get to see a favicon and maybe a word of the title if you're not a tab hoarder. So once you've scrolled halfway through a large article, the URL bar serves as the indicator of what you're actually reading. The same applies to news sites, magazines, blogs, Reddit, social media sites - which is quite likely the majority of browsing done by normal people.

spankalee 6y ago
I think you've identified some meaningful next steps to try after highlighting that the origin is the most significant part of the URL. Maybe the omnibox space can show the page title?
- paledot 6y ago
  <title>https ://totally-your-bank.com/</title>

codingdave 6y ago

It isn't meaningless to all humans - we get screenshots sent in to our support team all the time, and even if the end user doesn't know what the URL means, the support team does. That quickly lets them recreate problems, find bad data, and give the devs enough information to reproduce bugs.

berkes 6y ago

/r/webdev disagrees.

wwweston 6y ago

> many URLs are meaningless to humans past the domain. I'd argue this confuses meaningful with degrees of legibility. And also that it ignores how certain significant margins of users do learn this stuff. `item?id=24156986` is immediately meaningful at least at one level: you know at some level you're looking at a specific item resource under the domain news.ycombinator.com. Processing which one requires a lot more attention and you're probably not going to build up a mental directory of corresponding numbers with discussions, and so that particular meaning passes beyond the threshold of legibility, but that doesn't mean the number itself is meaningless, anyone who's made a habit of paying attention to URLs knows what it is, just not that final layer of correspondence. And it is not just web developers who know this stuff. I've seen laypeople who are just longtime browser users who have a pretty good idea how URLs like these work, not because anyone formally taught them how paths and query strings are spec'd, but just because the affordance of the URL bar is there and they've seen enough URLs correlated with browsing behavior to learn it by observance/association. The same way most people pick up language itself. The URL bar teaches some people who care to notice how URLs work, which makes URLs work better as a social tech. And it doesn't require anyone who doesn't care to do so. We lose that if we remove it. It's not a small loss.

baby 6y ago
I think these are the only meaningful usecases: - differentiating homepage from not-homepage - differentiating subdomains when folder structure is used instead of a subdomain

cryptonector 6y ago

While many URLs are not designed for human consumption, many are, and many users are "trained" to some degree to understand them. But most importantly, users need some visual (or auditory, if sight-impaired) cue as to what kind of site their on, what domain at the very least. That's why HN puts the domainname of the authority of any posted links next to the title. Regarding URLs that are not designed for human consumption, if they can possibly land in the status bar, then that's on their designers. Yes, of course, that's exactly what malicious players will do: design URLs that users can't parse -- but that's no reason to hide the bar altogether, but rather to hide parts of the URL (e.g., the scheme, the credentials, maybe the fragment, the query, even the path -- everything but the authority).

feanaro 6y ago

> If we could perfectly know which URLs have useful semantic information for users and which don't, and then only present those with full semantic meaning, I wouldn't mind much. That's a very large if, IMO. We cannot do this, practically speaking. Even in semantically meaningless URLs like the one in your example, there is still an important part of semantics retained and that is identity. By having the URL available you can at least compare two URLs and judge whether they are the same URL or not. Additionally, there is a 1-to-1 association between URL and content: for each unique URL, you get some unique content. I agree there might be some UX improvement possible here, but faced with the looming threat of Google AMP, it's not a time to twiddle our thumbs and idly fantasize about this without a complete and robust plan on how this improvement might be done. I also think that by hiding the URL we will make ordinary users even more ignorant about how the web works. It will truly appear like magic, since they will see identical strings in the URL bar yet they will be served different content. How does this even work? No one knows! Expect users that won't even know how to copy a link to someone.

notatoad 6y ago

not only are some URLs meaningless, they can in some cases be intentionally misleading. by hiding the non-domain portion of the URL, google is showing the only actual authoritative information contained in the URL: what site is hosting the page.

arendtio 6y ago

But then again, you could argue, that URLs are meaningless to people. They are just some weird text and have neither face nor voice. I am not sure what google tries to accomplish with those changes. Somehow it feels like some UX designer has made this his personal vendetta. Didn't they try it already some months ago and got pretty clear feedback? If this is about phishing, who established the theory, that people who don't understand URLs, understand how phishing works and that even the slightest deviation in a domain is dangerous?

tripzilch 6y ago
> I am not sure what google tries to accomplish with those changes. I think it's about the ways people can and do navigate the web. It's something you don't need if you navigate the web just via Google, so they get rid of it.