Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The importance of “http://”

dropsafe.crypticide.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 42 posts

Re: The importance of “http://”

#31

Post by isleyaardvark »

nudge wrote: post #26
isleyaardvark wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article listed bugs. Facebook and Twitter will work fine, it would just be more inconvenient because of the bugs introduced by the new scheme. It's not redundant information, it is information on what protocol is being used. That is important information. And this information is still being displayed, the only difference is it is displayed in an alternate form of an icon. An icon representation introduced by Chro…

You say the protocol being used is important. Is it? Why? I think it is not. I think the important things for 99.9% of people are: (i) this is a website, (ii) this is a secure website. The actual protocol being used is a technical issue that the user does not need to know. The user just needs to know if it is secure or not. You take issue with the icon. For years browsers have added a padlock to the UI when https://…

I don't take issue with icons in and of themselves, it's the replacement of the text representation with an icon. it's the break in conventions. The http/https part has always been visible on any browser. Having http:// at the beginning of URLs certainly isn't my idea of perfection, but to some extent we're stuck with it. It's much like the floppy disk icon for "Save". Why use that? There are kids today who have never even seen a floppy disk. But that doesn't mean that the floppy disk icon should just be up and removed from toolbars. A lot of thought should be put into a change like that.

Re: The importance of “http://”

#32

Post by nudge »

isleyaardvark wrote: post #29
nudge wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that is not understood by a user is potentially a source of confusion and error. The http prefix did nothing when navigating. You could type 'www.google.com' and get exactly the same result as ' http://www.google.com . It is redundant, unnecessary, wasteful. It can be removed, because it does nothing. This is a usability problem. You just don't experience it.

Yes, it did do something. It informed me that I was on an unsecure connection.

Do you generally assume you are on a secure connection unless told otherwise?

Re: The importance of “http://”

#33

Post by nudge »

ErrantX wrote: post #30

In all honesty I have only just noticed that the machine I am working on has this feature. I see the draw backs but the fact I haven't noticed for about 48 hours or more is, well, telling IMO.

Agreed. People seem to be upset mainly because of what they imagine certain users will do, rather than what they have actually seen happen.

Re: The importance of “http://”

#34

Post by nudge »

isleyaardvark wrote: post #31
nudge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say the protocol being used is important. Is it? Why? I think it is not. I think the important things for 99.9% of people are: (i) this is a website, (ii) this is a secure website. The actual protocol being used is a technical issue that the user does not need to know. The user just needs to know if it is secure or not. You take issue with the icon. For years browsers have added a padlock to the UI when https://…

I don't take issue with icons in and of themselves, it's the replacement of the text representation with an icon. it's the break in conventions. The http/https part has always been visible on any browser. Having http:// at the beginning of URLs certainly isn't my idea of perfection, but to some extent we're stuck with it. It's much like the floppy disk icon for "Save". Why use that? There are kids today who have neve…

It's not really like the save icon. The padlock for https is like the save icon, because it is a metaphor for a certain interesting state. Http, on the other hand, doesn't tell you anything except that you're not on https (or ftp, etc). So you don't need to be told about it.

Suppose the icon for your email program has a badge on it with an unread count. I'm suggesting that 'http:// is kind of like keeping that badge there with a zero when you have no emails.

Re: The importance of “http://”

#35

Post by diginux »

mansr wrote: post #8

This reminds me of what happened when Microsoft decided to trim known suffixes off displayed filenames. Has everybody forgotten the hot-babe.jpg.exe viruses? With unicode allowed in domain names, it's only a matter of time before someone registers http：／／gmail.com.

http://mct.verisign-grs.com/conversiontool/convertServlet?in...

Error:Input does not meet STD3 rules for domain name format.

Re: The importance of “http://”

#36

Post by tzs »

jwr wrote: post #21

I find it mindboggling that instead of removing the silly and superfluous "www." they are trying to remove the meaningful and important " http:// . It doesn't solve any actual problem and creates a slew of new ones.

"www" is only superfluous at some sites, and there is no way they can tell which. Even doing a name lookup on both and checking if the IP is the same is not sufficient, because they could be different virtual hosts on the same IP.

Re: The importance of “http://”

#38

Post by uriel »

pavlov wrote: post #25
nhebb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still do that. One of the first things I do on a new Windows system is to turn that "feature" off.

To be fair, Mac OS X does the same by default.

And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the configuration options.

Re: The importance of “http://”

#39

Post by superchink »

uriel wrote: post #38
pavlov wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Mac OS X does the same by default.

And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the configuration options.

http://cl.ly/UA5 (Finder Preferences)

Re: The importance of “http://”

#40

Post by edd »

uriel wrote: post #38
pavlov wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Mac OS X does the same by default.

And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the configuration options.

Finder > Preferences > Advanced > Show all filename extensions
Post reply on HN