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Comment by vntok | Hacker News Reader

If the browser absolutely 100% of the time knew that difference and showed "Wikipedia FR > Canada", wouldn't it be much simpler for the average user?

The browser could even show specialized UI such as "FR" as a clickable dropdown menu to allow users to switch languages. Chrome already does this for searching a single website through the address bar (type domain.com TAB)

Basically these changes are not thought for you. You are not representative of the average Web user.

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No, it's really important to retain all those dots and slashes. This is not sarcasm. I'm being completely serious when I say this. It's really easy notation, and the differentiation of context for dots, slashes, question marks and hashtags is really useful.

  Wikipedia FR > Canada

I look at that angle bracket with the white space, and I get chills. And I'm not even drawing attention to that oh-so-glaring omission of the /wiki/ context. Truly horrifying.

Repeat. This is not sarcasm.

Dark roads ahead, friends.

Hiding the URL would be a terrible idea, no matter how much "simpler" it would be for the average user: it would either only be enabled for a handful of websites chosen by Google (which would mean having an inconsistent UI) or create a lot of security issues (what if someone creates a website and manages to also display "Wikipedia FR" with a similar layout?).

Maybe it could show "Canada - Wikipedia" like the page authors intended as a title. Maybe if the page authors want to have links between languages, they could code that in a standard markup language themselves.

These aren't decisions for a useragent to make, and there aren't enough browsers out there that people have a reasonable choice.

Bastardising the url isn't a solution to anything, it's a step towards something that Google, not users, want (in making AMP "trivial").

A useragent is literally a user's agent, it is supposed to help its user browse their target website. It is not supposed to help the target website show things to the user.

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