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Comment by daffodil2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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