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by spurgu 1839 days ago
As a user it's often also helpful to understand the context of what you're reading (as long as the site has a descriptive URL structure) - is this a blog post, featured article, sponsored article, when was it written.... a good URL conveys a lot of useful information and hiding this seems highly counterproductive.

I am also very much against hiding "www.", but that's mostly from a developer/devops perspective. https/http can be hidden behind an icon, that's fine since it's a binary option, but that's as far as I'd go in accepting stripping information from URL's.
2 comments
exporectomy 1839 days ago
That's the kind of usage that only happens because it's available. No matter what internal information is presented to people, some will find a way of using that. But part of designing software is to curate what information to show the user, not dump an arbitrary pile of cryptic internal details on them.

URLs are mostly not fit for human consumption and don't even reliably show you what page you're on. They're a stinky skidmark on the otherwise human-accessible web.

I hope we can eventually have two clearly distinct parts to URLS - a simple domain name without www. or https:// and clearly separate, a human-readable name for the page without internal implementation details like filename extensions and symbols. Some sites are pretty close to this, New York Times is easily understandable but still filled with slashes and a redundant extension. Eg: "nytimes.com/2021/06/10/us/politics/justice-department-leaks-trump-administration.html". Hacker News is too but has a human-unfriendly "item?id=" before the (good, imo) incrementing decimal integer, not hex, not random, not padded ID number.

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wyattpeak 1839 days ago
I'm 100% with you, but I know plenty of fairly computer-literate people who wouldn't know how to interpret a URL, and wouldn't know what to do with that information if they did.

I don't know how those two stances, or the positions between them, break down across the population, but at minimum it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it leans towards not understanding or caring.

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