Some People Can’t Read URLs
jonoscript.wordpress.com
jonoscript.wordpress.com
On the one hand, I know very well just how incompetent many people are with computers. A random example: last week I nearly bit off my own hand while watching someone use a browser while giving a presentation. Every time she wanted to go to a different webpage, she would fumble around for a minute, get confused and then quit the browser. After restarting and letting it load her homepage (not Google), she would use the search bar to look for her goal.
So, ok, computers are tricky. Programmers are unhelpful and unkind. Designers focus on flash and not helpful visual cues. Blah, blah blah. But c'mon, why would anyone think that you need to quit the application to get somewhere else? You don't quit your email program to read or write another email. You don't leave your house to visit another room. You don't unplug the refrigerator (or even close the damn door) to find a the cheese when you already have the mustard.
Sometimes I feel sympathetic, but often I think people are just stupid and lazy.
> The idea of navigating by URL is so fundamental to how the Web works that it’s hard to imagine abstracting it away.
I have to disagree. For a very long time people got around quite nicely on AOL with nothing more than instructions to type "go facebook" and they'd be taken to the appropriate content. There's no reason that browsers couldn't be configured to point to a similar service by default. Typing the name of a popular site is unambiguous and it should redirect the user to that site.
Kinda like a meta-DNS.
Firefox has done this for a very long time. It uses Google. Most other modern web browsers behave similarly.
The users (and you) are behaving as if the semantics of that behavior patterns mean "take me to the Facebook page". Firefox & Google on the other hand uses the semantics of this to mean "go to the first ranked result of the search".
It's like going to a vending machine to get a candy bar (Snickers). The one you want happens to be at "a1". So you insert your money and hit the buttons for "a1". For a year you get the the Snickers bar you wanted. The semantics of "a1" mean "Snickers" to you, and the rest of the office, by this point -- but to the machine "a1" always means "a1".
Now, Joe, the vending machine guy decides to restock the machine one day and just so happen to put the Snickers at "b4" and the Pork Rinds at "a1". So the next day you come in to get your mid-afternoon Snickers and you dutifully hit "a1" just as you've trained yourself to do. Because remember, to you "a1" means "Snickers". The machine sees "a1" and thinks to itself "retrieve whatever item is at a1" not "retrieve the Snickers for samdk". You start to eat your Snickers, thinking to yourself "wow Mars Corporation really changed the packaging." You take your first bite and spit it out "WTF!!!! These Snickers are horrible!!!".
What I'm proposing is that if Joe the Vending machine guy sees that everyone equates "a1" with "Snickers" then instead of mapping keycodes to positions in the machine, he maps them to particular products. "A1" will always be "Snickers". So even if he moves it to "b4" inside the machine, the mapping of "a1" to "Snickers" still holds and the machine give you what you mean, not what it means.