| Let's assume (mostly) good intentions from google. The article mentions that users don't understand URLs. Pause to allow a moment to blame users for not trying. Then let's actually approach the problem constructively instead of blaming users. As I see it, the URLs contain two parts that matter to the user: the domain and then everything after that. (Scheme they can either handle or has been made moot by https everywhere, port is rarely used for the average user, etc) Domains actually ARE bad for the average user, because they identify a machine (or machine group) while the user cares about a company/individual identity. This is why it took 15 years to get people to stop assuming all websites started with "www". The domain works fine...for techies. It is poor for what users expect. As for everything else...the path, query params, and hash are all interpreted by the end machine. Some sites try to make it human usable (my thanks), but even those are consistant from one to another. So to Joe or Jane User, these are meaningless. It is easy to blame google and even easier to blame users. I love the url and hate efforts to hide it... but there really are tasks it does a poor job of that we have no particular good option for. Rather than blame the url (or these other parties) we should figure out a good way to address (pun unintended but appreciated) these issues. |