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Comment by Nemo_bis | Hacker News Reader

It's because of the omnibox that people no longer know what an URL is.

You have it backwards: The omnibox (or whatever you want to call it) came about because people don't know what the hell a Universal Resource Locator is.

Most people don't know how to navigate their local file system, let alone the internet.

Yes. To dig a bit, they don't know because platform providers have pushed the net in that direction for decades.

AOL keywords were thing. Then fancy domain names that don't sound like domain names. Then search keywords. Then hashtags etc. The goal has always been to not ask the customer to think about it and just get to businesses.

> Universal Resource Locator

The U stands for "uniform". Which kinda supports your point, actually.

I guess that's showing my age, URI used to stand for Universal Resource Identifier which URL derives from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#Re...

>The publication of IETF RFC 2396 in August 1998 saw the URI syntax become a separate specification and most of the parts of RFCs 1630 and 1738 relating to URIs and URLs in general were revised and expanded by the IETF. The new RFC changed the meaning of U in URI from "Universal" to "Uniform."

I think that’s part of it. I love URLs (and URIs). Another big part is the predominance of closed social media platforms where the concept of a URL is mostly irrelevant

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