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Comment by crashandburn4 | Hacker News Reader

I still think this is terrible. It flies against the principles of HATEOS, we have a design idiom that web developers /should/ be following to show us precisely where we are and what is happening in a website, why would we want to lose all of that information.

I would be very unhappy if they removed the option to disable this from chrome, almost to the point that I'd consider changing browsers (and I like chrome...)

</rant> (sorry about that)

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> why would we want to lose all of that information.

Because the url past the domain name is not for the user to be messing with most of the time. We the developers control everything to right of the first single slash. Maybe if it was hidden then it would force us to do a better job showing the users where they are in our sites with breadcrumbs and menus and at the same time keep them from trying to poke around in places where they shouldn't be. I think this is a perfect opportunity to open up our minds and build better UI inside the frame.

Exactly. Right now, there's little or no difference between 'we the developers' and everyone else. Keep doing those changes, there will be one. Developers will be a privileged class. It's no surprise that some people may want to alter that balance.

Um, no. If I want to share a link to a specific page, there's no reason to assume that I want to share any of the query string that is not actually required for somebody else to see the same page (like all of the tracky goodness that seems to be ubiquitous on the web these days) -- and for the same reason, there's no good reason for you to assume that I want to click on a "share" thingy on your page. And while breadcrumbs may aid me in navigation on my visit, the "how did I get here?" stuff has absolutely zero value to anyone who arrived at the page using a deep link. Oh, and if you make any of that compulsory, you won't get a link; your information just became valueless.

I'd argue that this supports the principles of HATEOS by only revealing the entry point URL, and letting the rest of the state of the system evolve from that point without bothering the user with the noise of intermediate details.

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