The more accurate claim would be: "DNS is for computers, not people", because that is actually true. URL's are for both, and so you see hints of both concerns

The more accurate claim would be: "DNS is for computers, not people", because that is actually true. URL's are for both, and so you see hints of both concerns represented. Once your routing passes a certain level of complexity, there is no way to make both functional and human-friendly URL's. The only thing that users should really be concerned with WRT to URL's is the DNS portion; pretty URL's are just that -- pretty -- and a rose by any other name... Ultimately the user should either have trust in your FQDN or not, at which point the actual URL is inconsequential. EDIT: additionally, a URL is not a UI element, and the user should never even need to see or know about any particular URL (much less its scheme), only that interacting with an anchor tag named "profile" takes them to the profile page, for example. It's up to developers to translate URL's to human-friendly counterparts.