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I can't agree at all with the author's basic premise, which makes it hard to agree with the rest of the article. >> URLs are the building blocks of the web. T

I can't agree at all with the author's basic premise, which makes it hard to agree with the rest of the article. >> URLs are the building blocks of the web. The web has lots of building blocks (hyperlinks, requests, the underlying protocols, HTML, and on the modern web: Javascript and XmlHttpRequest). We hide most of that implementation detail from the user because it's non-essential to the task at hand. How essential to the task at hand is the URL for most users? I may need a building's address to find it; once I walk into the building, do I need to continuously see that address? >> Every page has a unique URL so that you can identify it and share it with other people. That's a significant mis-statement of what a URL is. URLs have never been unique (witness www.foo.com vs foo.com), don't necessarily identify the page (witness dynamically-generated pages that are built with information from the client's cookies or state on the server), and their utility as a sharing tool is limited to what the server allows (witness access control). They're uniform resource locators... Nothing more, nothing less. A URL is a tool. A useful tool, certainly. But I don't keep all my useful tools constantly on display on my desk; I keep them in toolboxes until I need them. So I'd say "See how this experiment pans out."

gcb0 13y ago
> We hide most of that implementation detail from the user because it's non-essential to the task at hand. and then you have tons of security holes and bugs. Remember when browsers thought it was nice to hide loading from the user, and every site had to add "do not click submit twice" and such? what's next? one page apps relying on a share button and then having to write "do not share via the hidden URL"? ...google maps was like that for ages now that i think of that... We should be coming up with ways to make information denser and more meaningful. not scarcer.
- fixermark 13y ago
  "Do not click submit twice" isn't a side-effect of hiding loading; it's a side-effect of sites taking something that should be idempotent (a single purchasing transaction) and failing to code it to be idempotent. Nothing about the page loading UI would have prevented that issue.
thesash 13y ago
What if you read that statement as "URLs are the basic interface of the web"?
- thezilch 13y ago
  But they're not. Hyperlinks, shortcuts, or similar are. To most people, the internet is an icon on their desktop, that goes to the Google/Yahoo/Bing, with which you can search for Facebook. You're going to be hard pressed to teach this majority on the rules of parsing a URL to eek out the domain before you can even begin to teach them which domains to look out and what not to do with those unrecognized.

gcb0 13y ago

> We hide most of that implementation detail from the user because it's non-essential to the task at hand. and then you have tons of security holes and bugs. Remember when browsers thought it was nice to hide loading from the user, and every site had to add "do not click submit twice" and such? what's next? one page apps relying on a share button and then having to write "do not share via the hidden URL"? ...google maps was like that for ages now that i think of that... We should be coming up with ways to make information denser and more meaningful. not scarcer.

fixermark 13y ago
"Do not click submit twice" isn't a side-effect of hiding loading; it's a side-effect of sites taking something that should be idempotent (a single purchasing transaction) and failing to code it to be idempotent. Nothing about the page loading UI would have prevented that issue.

thesash 13y ago

What if you read that statement as "URLs are the basic interface of the web"?

thezilch 13y ago
But they're not. Hyperlinks, shortcuts, or similar are. To most people, the internet is an icon on their desktop, that goes to the Google/Yahoo/Bing, with which you can search for Facebook. You're going to be hard pressed to teach this majority on the rules of parsing a URL to eek out the domain before you can even begin to teach them which domains to look out and what not to do with those unrecognized.