| By ideal world I meant 'a better internet user experience within the next a decade or two' not 'all people are intelligent' as you meant. In the latter we would not be crouching over a browser anyway but do more evolved stuff :) We do not teach users what an URL is when all she wants is to read her emails, just as you do not teach them how that browser is written or how the data travels to and from destination. I share your wish that people would be more inquisitive and learn but some people are just not like that for various reasons or do not have time for that and trying to teach them stuff they do not care about flies in the face of good user experience. You use URL for many things including DB connections, this makes you a technical person. One of the reasons user experience is still shit in many applications is that many techies are convinced the user should be exposed to all the wonders of the underlying technology and consider this the noble quest of teaching them. Yes - network://hash-of-what-you-want is the content addressability I mentioned. So the 'locator' in URL is not going to be meaningful. You do not locate a resource, you get some stuff wherever it may be located - assuming it is in one single place and not built from bits located in various parts. Anyway it was a tangent to the main topic - even if we denote the content someway it should not be exposed to your users. Try asking around your non-tech relatives and see if they understand what the components of simple web url-s are.
My mom sure does not, and I have no intention of teahcing her that .com is some silly legacy from when it was thought that if you are a company that is what your webpage address, will be named like or what is with the slashes or even worse the ampersands. I do not assume users are stupid, they just don't give a shit about stuff that is cruft and that has little bearing on what they actually do on the web. The fact that tiny URLs are such widespread also underlines the fact that URL is a necessary evil by which you send someone to a resource and not something to inspect by people. There are complaints about them being opaque but much less then you'd expect given their massive use. So do not try to teach people who do not care about learning because they will not learn and you'll have wasted your time on them. |
The worry about "user experience" is the cholesterol-rich fast-food of design. It's terrible, dumbs users down, but, somehow, it's addictive. Imagine a world of immediate gratification and zero frustration. That's what many people are tying to build.
> they just don't give a shit about stuff that is cruft
Not everything you don't grasp, or that was decided before you were born, is cruft.
> The fact that tiny URLs are such widespread
Tiny URLs are a reaction against poorly-designed, overly complex URLs that convey little or no meaning. Nobody needs Bit.ly to go to http://www.google.com. I'm all in for not failing when a user fails to type http://, but I am completely against hiding it under a magical hood that will protect users from the dangerous unknown techniques under it.
Knowledge is power and, therefore, it belongs to the people. The better it's distributed, the better.