3 ms·

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 Googl

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.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I think the point is that outside of some big sites like Reddit with /r/ that over time the actual path has become completely meaningless and is just a site-specific chunk of data that sometimes happens to be a permalink useful to users but often is just a way for the site-operator to organize their stuff. This whole thing is just a reflection of the trend that URLs just mean actual.user.path.domain.tld/server/route#client/route
bootlooped 6y ago
People type street addresses into forms all the time though. Of all the times people type in a web address, what percent of the time do you think they type in anything past the tld? 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it. I think that's what it comes down to: if you're just copying and pasting the whole thing, there is no need to show the user all the garbage after the tld, it may as well be totally random characters to them. You can still copy and paste the whole thing. I'm not sure whether I'm in favor of this change or not, but I can see there are at least some valid reasons to do it.
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  > 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it. Then the existence of the URL is still justified by giving the user something to paste. So what if the user doesn't know what every single part of the URL means? They know that this URL gets them to this page and that URL gets them to that page. It's visible cause and effect. Get rid of it and we end up with "magic" where copying "news.ycombinator.com" on one page will produce a different outcome from copying "news.ycombinator.com" on a different page. This is how it works on iOS today and I think that eventually, users who only interact with iOS devices will not know what to make of that. Weo hide all complexity from non-technical users then winder why they don't understand the complexity that's still there underneath. I don't believe that we should continue doing that. If the problem with URLs is the URLs being long and scary, let's make websites with better and more readable 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.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I think the point is that outside of some big sites like Reddit with /r/ that over time the actual path has become completely meaningless and is just a site-specific chunk of data that sometimes happens to be a permalink useful to users but often is just a way for the site-operator to organize their stuff. This whole thing is just a reflection of the trend that URLs just mean actual.user.path.domain.tld/server/route#client/route

bootlooped 6y ago

People type street addresses into forms all the time though. Of all the times people type in a web address, what percent of the time do you think they type in anything past the tld? 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it. I think that's what it comes down to: if you're just copying and pasting the whole thing, there is no need to show the user all the garbage after the tld, it may as well be totally random characters to them. You can still copy and paste the whole thing. I'm not sure whether I'm in favor of this change or not, but I can see there are at least some valid reasons to do it.

emptyparadise 6y ago
> 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it. Then the existence of the URL is still justified by giving the user something to paste. So what if the user doesn't know what every single part of the URL means? They know that this URL gets them to this page and that URL gets them to that page. It's visible cause and effect. Get rid of it and we end up with "magic" where copying "news.ycombinator.com" on one page will produce a different outcome from copying "news.ycombinator.com" on a different page. This is how it works on iOS today and I think that eventually, users who only interact with iOS devices will not know what to make of that. Weo hide all complexity from non-technical users then winder why they don't understand the complexity that's still there underneath. I don't believe that we should continue doing that. If the problem with URLs is the URLs being long and scary, let's make websites with better and more readable URLs.