[alapee]

I agree with most of the posts above on specifics,but handling web comes down to 2 categories: Users and Developers (as stated several times above). Users in general hardly know how to properly search for something on the web: IE. I want to know about History of the Roman Empire during 1100 AD. I am going to go to a search Engine and Type in: Roman Empire 1100 AD. I have seen some users type in some weird things when dealing with this specific query. So I think properly teaching users how to use search engines is part of it, as far as hiding the URL and TLD Component. I have mixed emotions about it, I can see where this can lead to censorship and I can see how it will make the web safer for the next generation. As for ease of user on the user end, the jury is out on it currently.

[depricated]

I think it's definitely a worthwhile thought. There's no reason we should cling to old ways simply because that's what we're used to. As I've said, for me it's simply ingrained to the point that I have difficulty thinking how I'd approach it differently.

I think searching for content is a bad way to go. This I can speak from life experience. I have a habit of putting things in very specific places, because if I don't I have to search for them. If I don't keep my keys in their spot, I'm inevitably wasting time searching for them. One could argue that this is different, but think for a moment if you wanted to just go to reddit.com/r/programming - or any subreddit. Lets say you've never been to /r/programming but you know it exists and the exact URL (aside: this is the same sort of change to the function of a URL that jon and I were speaking of - where it no longer represents a server filepath but a logical instruction interpreted by the server). I could manually direct my browser to /r/programming, which takes seconds, or I could spend the extra time it takes to search for "reddit programming." Even though the first hit is r/programming, it requires at least one additional page load, search time, and significantly more GUI interaction.

It's always a good idea to reevaluate the capability and feasibility of any system. The less you question a concept the more you likely should.

[Ntwiles]

I'm starting to lean towards this being a bad idea. Totally getting rid of the use end-user URLs seems to my like cutting off the arm to treat a splinter. As web applications evolve, how we think about URLs needs to evolve with it. I think we need easier to use and more accessible url rewriting functions. Something higher-level and less dangerous to use than things like apache's mod_rewrite functions (does something like this exist already?). URL design needs to be a thing. I think that's what we should focus on before trying to drop the use of URLs altogether.

[Craig328]

In general, I'm tired of dumbing every damned thing down so even the stupidest mouth breathers among us can join the party. We have Google. If you can't remember the URL or it's too difficult to type, go search it. Two additional button clicks is the penalty.

Not everything needs to be "improved" in favor of the stupidest or laziest among us.

[bingy]

Craig I agree with you 100%. There is no need to change teh way URL's work or what they do. Making things easier for teh stupid is just stupid in itself.

[belgarion262]

Rather than bring/maintain our standards at the lowest to cater to the less techinically able people, we should raise our standards and encourage people to reach for them.

One option sends humanity forward, towards the stars. The other sends us backwards, downwards to fade.

[bingy]

Belgarion I totaly agree 1 way takes us and makes us better the other just sends us down the path of the movie Idiocracy

[depricated]

I just want to reiterate what I said earlier

There's no reason we should cling to old ways simply because that's what we're used to. It's always a good idea to reevaluate the capability and feasibility of any system. The less you question a concept the more you likely should.

Not that we should cater to the lowest common denominator - that's what console games are for - but it's not a bad idea to reevaluate the way we communicate. URLs as such were invented over 20 years ago. Technology has come a long way in that time. Just the way URLs are interpreted and used to store content data rather than paths these days is evidence that more is needed. There's no reason, for instance, that we should send an array as plain text when we're perfectly capable of sending it as an object in a header. The back end of GET_ in PHP just explodes the URL and builds an array from the variable identified - why do all the extra work of building the array into a string and then breaking it back apart, when we could just send the array straight across?

It's not that URLs are bad - they're awesome - but could we do it better? Why don't we look at that? Not making it easier or harder for users, but why NOT question what we're doing?

[jon.kiparsky]

I have to say, this reaction is really quite remarkable. I would think that search-in-browser is more of a smartening-up than a dumbing-down, and it clearly indicates a trajectory away from "user knows machine-oriented facts about the site" and towards "user knows what they want". Which is good - we like high-level interfaces, don't we?

Apart from the interface, there are also the consequences of this global namespace, which I think are even more important than the interface itself. For example, by providing a powerful incentive to tie a business name to a domain name, and to make a domain name memorable, we end up forcing businesses to choose bad business names and bad domain names. This seems like a bad outcome.

I guess we'll see how things work out, though. I think it's clear what trajectory we're on, but I guess I'm in a minority here. For what it's worth, I think that in ten years, there will be very few people who care about domain names, and people will be happier as a result.

[GWatt]

Of course people are overreacting. You titled the thread: `Death Of The URL' when a better title would have been `Google Slightly De-emphasizes URL And Encourages Chrome Users To Search Instead.' Not as catchy, but more accurate.
I don't know about most people, but my workflow has largely abandoned manually typing in URLs. I will type words into the url/search bar, but as I frequent a few sites, after 4-6 letters it pops up and I hit `Enter.' For pages that I don't often visit but are important (company's aws login,) I bookmark. Every other time, I search.

[jon.kiparsky]

GWatt, on 07 May 2014 - 08:44 AM, said:

Of course people are overreacting. You titled the thread: `Death Of The URL' when a better title would have been `Google Slightly De-emphasizes URL And Encourages Chrome Users To Search Instead.' Not as catchy, but more accurate.

Touché. Yes, I admit the headline was a little much.