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Comment by richardwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

These are all good ideas, but there's part of me that wonders that because they are all being broken by Microsoft, Google, Amazone (as demonstrated in the article and in the comments here) that the importance of them is overstated.

URLs are fundamentally for web browsers to translate into a domain name lookup, and a HTTP request. They are for computers - the fact that we've managed to convince humans that they should care about them, that they should be decipherable by humans, is, IMHO a failing of the web as is.

On a side note, I note that films are starting to use Facebook URLs by doing [FB Logo]/trancethemovie which the user is intended to translate into https://www.facebook.com/trancethemovie

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This is an often-heard argument: "Amazon (or other large company) are doing it and it works just fine for them."

But you are not Amazon. Your listings may be competing against Amazon's listings, without the brand recognition, trust and backlinks they have built up.

So you have to do everything better, like building friendly urls, just to have a chance of getting clicks that Amazon can take for granted.

(Amazon does a pretty good job at urls, as others have pointed out, but most larger, established companies are still pretty poor at this, leaving the door open for upstarts to do it better).

Exactly, and people also forget that Amazon, eBay, et al had horrible urls when they first launched, because just having the platforms at all was a big step forward. Old eBay urls have cgi-bin in them.

According to that logic we might as well do away with DNS entirely, and just use numeric IPs in URLs.

I thought that literally the entire point of URL's was that humans can't remember and use IP's naturally so we created URL's and DNS to let humans interface with the machine IP language.

If URL's are actually intended for computers, than I'd say we've failed rather badly.

The whole point was to interface with people.

If people don't matter and it's for machines, why use URLs? Just type IP's. Skip DNS all together...

Google is the new DNS. Only a small subset of people care about URLs beyond the domain name (this subset has a large overlap with HN readers). Unless you've nothing else to improve, there are usually more effective ways to improve your websites that you can spend that time on.

> I thought that literally the entire point of URL's was that humans can't remember and use IP's naturally so we created URL's and DNS to let humans interface with the machine IP language.

That'd be the base URI, but not the full one. If you used IPs, it would still be http://123.456.789.123/search&q=foo

well, now adays there aren't enough IPv4 addresses for all the websites out there. vhosts have become very popular for hosting. I'd imagine if we didn't have DNS, IPv6 would have been pushed through much much faster.

Just type IP's

How exactly would you get at a particular resource at that IP? That's what we're all talking about.

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