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Comment by hunter2_ | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people care so much about a messy address bar as a messy chat/email message after pasting a URL. Shorteners and vanity URLs exist, but that's more friction than just copying from the address bar as-is.

This can be overcome with html, markdown, and other rich text formats that let you specify the visible link text (missing from many chat apps*), but that's also friction to compose compared to automatically linking from just a URL.

*Slack's implementation is awesome: type the link text, highlight it, and paste a URL.

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> I don't think people care so much about a messy address bar as a messy chat/email message after pasting a URL.

But it's painful how few care about that!

I always clean them up before I send them (just manually - typically meaning all query parameters, e.g. with Amazon the text description after the actual ID) rarely even feel the need to check they still work, it's pretty easy, but maybe I shouldn't bother because it's only me that cares; they don't seem to notice that their links occupy half the screen and my don't!

It's not even only about messiness. "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315441" isn't some horrible long base64, but it's not a good UX either: when you paste it in a messenger, or in your notes, by default the reader can't tell what's it about without clicking.

> *Slack's implementation is awesome: type the link text, highlight it, and paste a URL.

Yes! Matches my vision of hypertext perfectly: I usually type a message in normal human language and then paste links all over it for the reader who needs to dig deeper.

> by default the reader can't tell what's it about without clicking.

Most chat apps like Discord will automatically include an embed generated from a URL's metadata when present in a message.

At least in Telegram, this works for at most one link per message, and quickly fills the screen if you send multiple such messages.

And I believe that there is no standard API to get previews of non-public websites in a work chat, you need to develop site-specific bots or something like that?

> previews of non-public websites

It would be interesting if browsers / OSes / apps offered a way to use the browser's cookie jar / basic auth headers / whatever sessioning scheme in whatever apps the user decides should display authenticated previews. Ask the user to allow the release of browser data scoped to the domains that the app suggests. Similar to how some Android apps can put up a prompt to release a Chrome-saved password to an app (which I really wish more apps would include).

I just include a screenshot. It’s not that hard.

Plesse no

Examples of why this is bad:

* http://example.com/settings/transferownership?to=efreak * http://example.com/settings/deleteaccount?confirm=true * http://example.com/sendmoney?to=efreak&amount=10000

Might need a redirect. Do previews follow redirects? Does your poorly-written chat app filter urls by protocol, or does it just look for a token with '://'? A good app will allow me to link to things like steam://connect/IP so I can invite you to a game.

* tel:9005555555 (call a phone number. Fortunately, this requires confirmation these days, but what if you're on desktop or the app that does texting can directly make calls without invoking the dialer?) * steam://exitsteam (steam will exit if it's running)

There is a standard for this. It's called oEmbed: https://oembed.com/

The chat host still likely needs access to the "non-public website" to discover and call its oEmbed API, so that's something you'd have to figure out, but any website anywhere can offer oEmbed metadata if it wishes.

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