I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
Marginalizing URLs as something that only "people with technical skills" do (and/or should?) care about is no different from any other phenomenon where you take some boring, everyday, mostly unremarkable practice that doesn't involve the use of a computer and then change it where the moment someone gets a whiff of the presence of a computer in the pipeline they throw up their hands and say, "I don't know"/"I don't get this"/"I'm not a computer person".
It's really the doing of both non-technical people and technical people in and adjacent to the modern software industry alike that most people consider URLs gobbledygook instead of what they are: identifiers for a given work. It's especially perverse that the practices of both classes are responsible for most URLs being unsuitable for use Works Cited pages. That could definitely use some fixing, but we do such a poor job (in the US at least) already at explaining, during high school when it's supposed to be covered, the value of proper sourcing and citing that even smart kids come away thinking in terms of superficialities like the rigidity of formats and citation style rather than the actual fundamentals of scholarship. URLs are not exceptional in that regard.
(A scream goes out)Function before form, always!
The scheme is rather pointless to display in a browser bar nowadays.
And anyone claiming otherwise should riddle me this: How do most non-technical people in the world access "awesomepageireallylike.something"? That's right, they click into the address bar, start typing until the string they remebered appears, and then click on that. And what is that? Exactly: A Google search.
One does not need a technical background to understand URLs.
Browser hiding URLs is like an OS hiding file system structure from users, because files and directories are "too technioal" for them.
Sure he should. But design maxime of a lot of contemporary software does exactly the opposite: Hiding as much of the "icky techy stuff" from the user as possible.
> One does not need a technical background to understand URLs.
That's true, but doesn't change the fact that most people don't. For example, how many people know that the domain of an URL is organised right-to-left? I met people in tech, including programmers, who never figured that out.
> Browser hiding URLs is like an OS hiding file system structure from users, because files and directories are "too technioal" for them.
I agree. And now open a contemporary smart phone interface, and show me, without any special tooling, the actual, "physical" file system. And these things are probably the most successful consumer computing platforms ever.
Yes, I had phones in mind when writting the above :)
> And these things are probably the most successful consumer computing platforms ever.
Users don't have better choice in this market.
What I am certain of, is that it's very inconvenient to not have access to file systems.
Yes, well, this is how mobile OSs behave and most people don't seem to care or even notice...
> Hiding it from users goes against the main usability principle that the user should understand what's going on.
The main usability principle is that the user should understand what matters for them. Seeing the path of the URL is completely useless to 99% of web browsing. Better hide it by default and let power users see it if they want.
> URL is a central concept in web browsing.
Two responses, depending on one's mood:
1. So?
2. Resource identifiers—which URLs are—are a central concept to information science, scholarship, and society and culture.
Aside from the (admittedly often irrational) tendency of some non-technical people to strike a pose of helplessness,* you also end up with technical people making comments like this one: generally taking the stance that it's not too hard to pick this stuff up, with the goal that non-technical people will end up with an appreciation/conception of a URL's technological bones that at least approximately matches the informed mental model of the technical person who is speaking—and who themselves doesn't stop to consider what they themselves have got wrong and are possibly continuing to do wrong by society wrt their role in (negatively) shaping the information architecture of the world around them.
Without a URL, you can't text someone a webpage, refer to it in a social media post or a tweet, or link to it in a document. You can't make links.
Sure, you can browse the web without it. But you can't use any of our everyday basic tools for sharing and content creation without it.
I don't think we can expect URLs to be read in full by people on phones :(.
> You need to scroll it sideways if you want to find something in it.
> I don't think we can expect URLs to be read in full by people on phones :(.
That's because it's implemented inconveniently, a single line. When user taps the address bar, the browser could expand it into an URL editor, conveniently wrapping lines by url parameter boundaries, etc
Of course, you should always have the option to see the full URL, but why exactly do you need that clutter on display the whole time? It’s like complaining that the browser renders HTML instead of printing it all as unformatted text.
But seriously, what are you trying to say, that we need to make software match our contemporary physical experience? No, we can do better.