Ask HN: Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font?

3 pointscool-RR8 comments

I was just making some presentation in Powerpoint, and I was writing down a URL in it. Instinctively I set it to be in a fixed-width font, because it seemed to make sense that this is how URLs should be displayed.

Then I realized that browsers display URLs in a variable-width font.

Do you think this convention makes sense? Unless someone here raises some issue that I missed, we can suggest to the Chrome and Firefox people to consider using a fixed-width font instead.

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You have a point when it comes to the proportions of dots and such, but I'm not sure if it'd be a fix to a problem which doesn't exist. I don't think it'd effect phishing much either, since that kind of user wouldn't understand that dots are important, et cetera.

But anyhow, here's a quick mockup: http://grab.by/11oz

Not all code is in fixed font. Most older Pascal and Algol texts put their code in variable width, sans-serif fonts to set them apart from the text. For many texts, just changing the font is the solution.

URLs look bad in PowerPoint, but sometimes they need to be there.

> Unless someone here raises some issue that I missed

That you haven't explained any benefit of doing so?

I'm sorry, I haven't explained my motivation well enough:

URLs are "machine text", not "human text".

Practical examples would be: Easier to spot phishing URLs, easier to mark and edit parts of the URLs.

In fixed-width font every character has the same width. Useful in coding mostly because succeeding lines are aligned precisely to each other. But, to get a little more philosophical, it also gives the message of: "Every character is equally important". For example, a dot is very important in code, and it has the same width as other characters in a fixed-width font. But in "human text" dots, while still important, have a tiny width.

In a URL a dot is very important, and thus shouldn't have a tiny width. It often happens to me that I want to select text before/after the dot in a URL but it's so hard to do it precisely because the dot is so small.

it also gives the message of: "Every character is equally important".

That's a perceptive insight. I never thought of it that way before.

> URLs are "machine text", not "human text".

This is no longer true. Partly as a consequence of SEO concerns, most URLs are now extremely descriptive of the resources to which they point.

Interesting. But even if they are descriptive, I don't think this will mean they're now human-text instead of machine-text. After all, code is ideally descriptive as well.

why does it make sense that a url be set in fixed width?

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