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> Not everybody, not even most people, want to understand "how to web works", "how urls work" or anything else along those lines.

There are also a surprising number of people that don't want to be literate. In the modern world, we have generally regarded such views as wrong. Basic literacy is such an important skill to have, we have even created various mandates to provide the necessary education to all children.

Technology has simply added a handful of additional details. Nobody is suggesting that every has to learn all the subtleties of URLs or read RFC 1738. Much like tuning the engine in a car, these are technical details safely left to experts.

Anybody who wishes to participate in this new, technology-filled world (i.e. ~"everybody") will need to make a few minor additions to their skill-set[1]. One of these is to know what a URL is, in concept, and be able to differentiate between the host-part and the path-part. Being able to parse the path/query-string is not necessary. The necessary skill is being able to recognize that "example.com/foo/bar/baz" is more specific than "example.com", or being able to guess that "example.com/2014/04/18/the-great-quux" is probably a specific article posted last month.

This skill is important to have to participate in the modern world, not just to use a "web browser". You see URLs everywhere. Many print ads now have a URL in them, for example. This is the new literacy, de facto.

[1] Other skills might include understanding that text shaped similar to "foo@example.com" is probably an email address, how to use a mouse, and what terms such as "password" or "login" mean.

That's a really great point, thank you.

My only possible objection is to observe that clearly some things are important/necessary to teach, others aren't, and all we're arguing about is which of these URL's fall into. Nobody here is (currently) arguing against such basic things as login's and passwords, or that "foo@example.com" should obviously to everyone be an email.

The reason I think URL's are over the line is because everything after the domain name is usually an implementation detail. Some sites will have "id=234234234", some sites will have complicated paths, some sites will have nice, readable URL's, and a large part of the difference is the specific framework or approach that the Web Devs decided to use. Do you really think it's important for people to understand the decisions behind this? That's over the line IMO.

Also, another knock against URL's being required is that, de facto, people don't understand URL's and seem to use the web just fine. That's because us selfless developers have been working hard to abstract away the issue from users. I think most users don't understand URL's, and this doesn't bother them in the least until you get to issues like phishing attacks. So all Chrome would be doing is recognizing an existing situation, and helping make it better.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that even the easy examples you mention, e.g. passwords, are something that most users don't really understand, and for exactly that reason, developers have been trying to get rid of passwords for many years. And IMO, one of the big benefits of Facebook is that it makes the "send a message to someone" game much easier than email for real users, so that's a knock against email.

I really don't think that understanding URL's is akin to being basically literate. I think the bar is much lower, and that we as developers forget just how much specialized knowledge we already know, and how much the average user already has in order to use a computer these days.

That said, it's a great analogy so thanks for bringing it up!

> de facto, people don't understand URL's

Here is evidence that shows a lot of "average users" do have some understanding of what URLs are, and even if not the technical details, then at least the concept (which is definitely more important than the details):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729

Just as it would be unreasonable to require that anyone who drives a car roughly understands how an engine works, it would be similarly unreasonable to require that anyone who uses the internet roughly understands how addressing works. It is of course true that your car ownership experience will be greatly enriched by understanding roughly how an engine works, and that your internet experience will be greatly enriched by understanding how addressing works. But neither should be a prerequisite.

You underestimate how subtle the concepts underlying addressing are, probably because, like many technical people, you have understood how URLs work for so long that you can no longer remember what it is like to not understand them.

There's a rich irony in your avoidance of the most obvious car analogy possible: between internet addressing and street addressing.

Understanding URLs is in no way similar to even a rudimentary understanding how an internal combustion engine works.

What it's most similar is understanding how we address and route physical destinations so that you can get there in your car.

As I said in another comment:

Try and explain to the average user why URLs on HN look like this:

news.ycombinator.com/?id=123123

Whereas on CNN they look like this: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/04/world/africa/nigeria-abduc...

Whereas on another news site (Israeli) they look like this: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4516118,00.html

Whereas on Reddit they look like this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/24p3tm/japanese_photog...

Each one of these is a completely different implementation detail which the average user doesn't care about and, honestly, won't necessarily understand without understanding the underlying technology behind these sites.

Remember: Most users barely understand, if at all, what a browser is! And if you want to see a comparable challenge, try to explain to someone just one thing - why do some sites have www vs. not.

The parent's sentence was really great:

"You underestimate how subtle the concepts underlying addressing are, probably because, like many technical people, you have understood how URLs work for so long that you can no longer remember what it is like to not understand them."

> Try and explain to the average user why URLs on HN look like this:

That's easy. "The information following the domain name is used to route your request to the appropriate destination".

> Each one of these is a completely different implementation detail which the average user doesn't care about and, honestly, won't necessarily understand without understanding the underlying technology behind these sites.

Why do they have to understand the "underlying technology" at all?

If you think physical addresses are simpler, you'd be wrong:

   Sgt John Smith
   Headquarters Company
   7th Army Training Center
   ATTN: AETT-AG
   Unit 28130
   APO AE 09114-8130

or:

   Mr John Doe 
   CMR 333 Box 2345
   APO AE 09903-0024

or:

   John Doe
   C/O Acme, Inc.
   STE 12
   123 Main St NW
   Placename, State  12345-1234

or:

   Jane Doe 
   P.O. Box 562 
   Placename, State 12345

or (this is dual addressing, guess what it means? it doesn't mean the P.O. box is at 123 Main St NW):

   Jane Doe 
   123 Main St NW
   P.O. Box 562
   Placename, State 12345-1234

or:

   Don Johnson
   Professor, GIS Studies and Internet Arguments
   UCIA Computer Science Department
   5th Floor Rockefeller Building East
   C/O UCIA
   12345 Main Address Street
   Placename, State, 12345-1234

These are complicated, and we haven't even delved into common abbreviations, street layout consistency, relative addressing, or, god forbid, international addressing.

Yet somehow people write, address, and successfully send mail, every single day. They get in their cars and navigate the interstates and the weird street grids and one-way streets that they're unfamiliar with, and eventually wind up at the right place.

Or, they plug the address into their GPS and get there, without ever really understanding how the GPS performs the routing, just that it does, but still fully cognizant of what the addresses mean, even if they don't understand the system under which they were allocated.

I don't think your argument holds water; not even a little.

Well, you're absolutely right that I don't understand most of those addresses.

You're right that I could still send them mails though, in exactly the same way people use URL's - rote copying them, then letting the technology (or mail system) work its magic. I don't need to understand your PO box example to get it working.

> Try and explain to the average user why URLs on HN look like this: > > news.ycombinator.com/?id=123123

Easy. All most people need to get out of that is the fact that there's a domain name there, and something to make each page unique. I suspect most people would also quickly recognize that each page has it's own number, similar to street addresses or the serial number found on just about everything these days.

They don't have to actually parse it as a query string. The fact that some URLs reveal a lot more information (like your CNN example) is a bonus.

> Remember: Most users barely understand, if at all, what a browser is!

Remember: 14% of adults[1] in the U.S. are illiterate.

Nobody said that we have everything solved. That doesn't mean we should give up and pretend the problem doesn't exist by saying that "most people don't need to read".

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-... (original source: Dept. of Education)

I'm very surprised at that statistic, so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

"They don't have to actually parse it as a query string. The fact that some URLs reveal a lot more information (like your CNN example) is a bonus."

Well, what you're saying is exactly what Chrome is doing - make people only care about the domain, don't bother with the rest of the information as it's "only there to make a page unique". What exactly are we disagreeing on?

I think grandparent's point was that the part after the domain serves simply as identification of the information that is requested from the domain. Just like the foo in foo@bar.com identifies the user at that email domain. The user doesn't need to understand the particular implementation of the identification, just the principle "same string, same page". This is important to understand that URLs can be copied and used as links on the web. I've seen people not understand this: e.g. someone uploading a video to Youtube, then when I suggest to add a link to another video, or their Facebook page, not knowing that this can be achieved by copying the URL of the relevant pages out of the address bar. This is the missing internet literacy, and it seems unlikely that moving away from the "URL is just a piece of text" principle would make the understanding easier.

Sadly the simple principle of "same URL, same information" breaks down somewhat because of cookies (and, to a lesser extent, IP localization and user agent). http://facebook.com/ shows completely different information dependent on the logged-in account, and in fact that same person mentioned above was aware that URLs without a path part is the home page of that domain, and was thus expecting that http://facebook.com/ would show the same information to everyone. I'm not sure whether he/she really believed that the whole world should be seeing his/her posts, but it surely is a bad move by Facebook, it actively breaks the premise of URLs and is thus arguably damaging for internet literacy (and perhaps they are purposely doing it to mislead some people into a false sense of personal importance).

I agree with the first point, but it breaks down for me when you suggest that the principle of "internet literacy" is more important than making things easier to use for the user. I would not want the people building my car to have never invented the automatic gear, because they decided somehow that it removes me from understanding how a car works.

The difference is that understanding what a gear is is not essential to the functioning of a car at all. You can completely remove it without loss for that particular user nor for the community of car users.

Whereas not knowing that a URL is a piece of text which specifies a particular content on a domain and can thus be copied and used for linking is a loss both for the user and for the community.

You'll have to reinvent the principle of linking in another form to avoid the loss (e.g. every web and local app would need special GUI functionality to use instead, and the need for specification what to link would not be completely removable, unlike the gear).

A mistep with urls is that they're encoded when shown in the address bar. If spaces etc were just shown as is they'd instantly become more readable. Given that possibility you might find that developers drop a lot of the noise like hyphens (which really is a hack to have readable spaces in urls anyway).

"Try and explain to the average user why URLs on HN look like this"

You're missing the point, you don't have to understand that anymore than you have to understand why my street number is 4 digits long or my street name ends in "street" instead of avenue, crescent, drive, lane, etc.

It's not literacy, it's more like knowing car's engine error codes. Arcane knowledge which is very useful if you're mechanic but would be mostly useless trivia for anybody else. Guessing "example.com/2014/04/18/the-great-quux" is a date-based URL is a nice parlor trick but most sites don't even have this URL scheme or any URL scheme at all. Next to none of the phishing-relevant sites does. No print ad would have URL of any complexity - if it would have anything beyond domain name it'd be a single keyword.

I would liken more to like the readouts of the car. Say we hide the fuel gauge behind a menu and replace it with a "need gas" symbol. A clueless user might say "I don't want to learn how the fuel gauge or recirculating air button work. I just want to know if I need gas right now."

But knowing how to plan your trips/stops is important, as is knowing where your air is coming from.

Nobody is asking people to understand the HTTP protocol. This is understanding how information is addressed in the 21st century.

The more apt comparison might be physical mail addresses. People should understand (and it is taught in schools!) the basic format and the structure of it. We don't ask them to understand (in the states) the layout of zip codes, but we do expect them to understand that the first line refers to street address.

Similarly, we can do the same education for information today. We can explain the design behind the structure, the beauty and simplicity in URL design. (not always, I get that) Or, we can just continue on the path we're headed and tell users: "just type this into the search bar (Google), and a website comes back, along with some ads (probably)".

While I would love for the simple idea of the URL scheme to be something everyone understands, I highly doubt it's every going to happen. I'm sad about this, but I live in the real world with real people, and I've seen the kind of stuff they do and don't learn, whether by ability or by inclination.

What's sad is that we've had URL schemes for 20 years and they aren't taught in school. Also sad is many people think we teaching algebra and calculus secondary education is a given but basic concepts like domain names in a URL are "too complicated" for the real world.

I get where you're coming from, and I'm not sure whether I agree or not.

Personally, I think modern education is wrong-headed time most of the time, but I'm not sure I'd switch to teaching URL schemes if I was overlord of the universe. I'd much more likely insist on teaching the basics of economics, finance, logic, rationality, human psychology, etc.

URLs would still be far down my list.

Basic URLs take literally a single day to teach. The people you're teaching them to already have more contact to them than almost anyone else. Schools already have computer classes (or should have anyway).

Then you want to teach them basic finance so they can't throw away their money, except on a phishing attack? We should make users more powerful, not take away everything that can hurt them like hiding pointy triangles from kids.

You might not be giving people enough credit, people without CS degrees have been using URLs in emails and forum posts to link to information for years.

If there was some level of abstraction/automation to allow addressing physical mail without knowing street numbers, zip codes, etc., I would be fine with that. I imagine there is actually a lot of problems with mail delivery because of the messiness of addresses. I've encountered it a few times in the USA (some carriers want "Route P" but some want "Highway P," and some want "Suite 404" but some want "4th Floor"), and I bet it can get even messier, especially in poorer countries.

> Not everybody, not even most people, want to understand "how to web works", "how urls work" or anything else along those lines.

I still want to support those that do, and prevent them from having unnecessary burdens on their way. Understanding how things work is hard enough already by itself.

>>I for one am very happy that the creators of automobiles have bothered to make the process so simple, even a moron at automobiles like me can drive in car and have it work 99.9% of the time, and the rest of the time - it's clear I need to take it to an expert.

On the other hand, you are required to get a driver's license before you are allowed to drive, because if you don't know the rules, you can harm yourself and other people.

Perhaps that's the direction we need to go: an Internet User's License that teaches people the basics so that they don't harm themselves and other people. They don't need to know how the Internet works to use it, but they should be expected to know how to keep themselves and others safe.