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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

> This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL.

URLs have always been an implementation detail and not a user feature. From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. HTML was built on hiding URLs behind text. Then AOL keywords happened. Then search explosion happened. And short URLs. And QR codes for real-world linking. And bookmarks because yet again typing in URLs is not a major driving use case.

Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the web. If anything URL obfuscation is a core building block of the web and is a huge reason _why_ the web skyrocketed in popularity & usage. Don't pretend that somehow AMP obfuscating URLs will be the death of the web. The web exploded in growth despite massive, wide-spread URL obfuscation over the last 20 years. Nothing is actually changing here.

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I am not comfortable with someone else's domain becoming the de facto front door to my website.

There's nothing I can do it about it, but I tend to hate it.

If my name is Mike and someone powerful calls me Chucklehead, I will have to start answering to that name in order to continue doing business.

But what REALLY concerns me is if a year later, that powerful someone calls someone ELSE Chucklehead.

Well then don't use AMP? It's your domain, it's under your control. You at least have a choice here, whereas you can't block most other forms of URL obfuscation when being linked elsewhere.

Google is deprioritizing sites without amp in search to force them to use it.

So, if I search for something on reddit, I already learned to use duck duck go. Cause then I don't have to edit url to get rid of amp part not scroll up and down for that link.

> Google is deprioritizing sites without amp in search to force them to use it.

Isn't that just a protection racket?

That's a super valid complaint and also completely orthogonal to any of this nonsense about the web being killed because a URL was obfuscated.

Isn't google already the front door to everyone's website? Are the amp URLS really crazy? If you have a .com address is that roughly the URL in search results?

Your link is being shared from Google's search results and their application, so you might not like it but they have every right to control how it's displayed. Is it difficult to accept traffic from an AMP link? Are there technical downsides besides being called a name you don't want?

The "web" is built around "human readable" technologies. Even actual implementation details that the user doesn't care about - like the application layer protocol (HTTP) and the source code for pages (HTML, CSS) - is human readable.

The "point" of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we'd just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.

That said, I still have a bunch of "ancient" tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That's how we found things then.

People forget that there was a world before Google.

> From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs.

so, about that

    4.6 Locators are human transcribable.

   Users can copy Internet locators from one medium to another (such as
   voice to paper, or paper to keyboard) without loss or corruption of
   information.  This process is not required to be comfortable.

you can't copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right resource, now, do you?

accessing the URL is listed as one of the fundamental use case for them, and for good reasons, detailed elsewhere in the same rfc

Thank you.

I agree with most this... but have somewhat of a counter point to "you can't copy a page title".

You (often) can copy a page title into a client (Google) and expect it to find the right resource. This is usually done with articles, etc.

Even your comment provides a perfect example - you didn't link to RFC 1736, but the text "Locators are human transcribable" is unique enough that the first Google result is correct.

So you didn't have to provide a URL to lead someone to this page, just 'enough' unique text for it to be findable.

Which is kind of amazing - and maybe not what the original RFC intended.

counterpoint: https://i.imgur.com/ORLixJa.png

none of the result here are pointer to the source I've used

sure the content is the same, but the resource isn't, if anything this demonstrates how easy is to misled a user, directing him on a different resource thinking it's the same.

compare with stack overflow result:

https://i.imgur.com/maJi47G.png

luckily prominent sites get pushed on top of the result queue (had to cut it because it was submersed by advertisement) but the attack vector is evident.

>You (often) can copy a page title into a client (Google) and expect it to find the right resource. This is usually done with articles, etc.

So web was designed with using Google in mind? woot

> you can't copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right resource, now, do you?

You can type it into Google, though...

mhm https://i.imgur.com/maJi47G.png

My mother opens every webpage by typing the URL into google

Because web browsers default "home screen" has a large text box by default. People think that's where the address goes, but not really, that's actually a web page which does search. Shame on us for designing it that way.

But on another note, it will be the day when your mother (or anyone else for that matter) types in 'www.walmart.com' and actually goes to 'www.target.com' (names taken from other examples that I've seen on Twitter).

That is already happening

I made a new webpage for my father, and my mother cannot open it, since google does not know about that and there are no links to it.

Maybe Firefox should change the default screen from containing search to containing the address bar instead. That way if you type in a proper URL there it should go directly to it rather than doing a search.

Not going to happen, that very search box is Firefox's main source of income.

There is unfortunately a tax on stupidity, and in this day and age it is paid with one's personal data to multinationals.

> Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the web

Making people type in URLs is not a key feature of the web. Letting people interact with their various signifiers has always been.

Too many people involved in UX and product and commentary have forgotten that "don't make me think" doesn't mean "don't let me think."

The URL is a set of half a dozen affordances.

URLs have always meant something to users. It’s how you trust the content and indeed the link. And now with so many exploits and phishing it’s even more important. Typing in a URL might be rarer, an honour only reserved for google, facebook etc. but reading urls is very important

Let's distinguish between obfuscating the query parameters, the the path, and the domain. They are different things, and the domain name especially is a major security boundary.

Most of what I mentioned did obfuscate the domain name. Users do not care about domain name security boundaries - that's yet again an implementation detail. An important one, but still not something most users recognize or care about. Hence, you know, why phishing is so successful.

Users used to care about paths and other descriptors. A decade ago, we were fighting for human readable resource locators. However, users have been taught progressively to ignore them as too complex. (Just the same as it happened for any advanced, but user accessible browser controls.) Why is it that 25 years into web usage, any controlled access is deemed too complicated? (Mind that other technologies were already approaching the end of their lifespan at a similar age. The web is neither new nor disruptive anymore.)

Why is it that 25 years into web usage, any controlled access is deemed too complicated?

Two words: corporate greed. It's so much easier to persuade and herd them to where they can be "monetised" when they don't know how things work, nor can't figure out how and where to learn.

Somehow the knowledge industry has turned into dumbing down as a business. There's a TV ad for a smart speaker integrated car, showing a hip, but managerial type man downloading the route to his workplace to his car by a voice command from home and subsequently happily arriving at work. – How do you manage to make a living, if you can't memorize you daily drive from home to work? How is this a product? Has augmentation of human intellect turned into a zero-sum game?

I use navigation to avoid heavy traffic. Most of the time it changes nothing but sometimes saves 30 minutes of driving.

This is categorically wrong. URL is the fundamental part of the web and without it, the Internet couldn't be decentralized. Imagine if I must reach tweeter by typing "tweeter" somewhere then that somewhere now becomes the gatekeeper. The URL allows distributed gatekeepers. A mechanism with a distributed structure will need something like URL infrastructure.

You're talking about writing URLs as if that's the only purpose they serve. You also read URLs.

Same as I'm not going to type a long path to a file on my file browser or CLI, I'm not going to type the full, character-by-character URL. But being able to see the path also provides extremely useful information.

Sidenote: your comment gets downvoted,huh. Though I don't agree with you I'm happy to see someone with opposite arguments. Have an upvote as you contributing greatly to this conversation.

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