> 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 sign

> 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.