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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, count me as a programmer type that enjoys the feature and is having a hard time figuring out what there is to hate about it.
I don't hate the bar, I hate the lack of a button to easily navigate up to the parent directory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, count me as a programmer type that enjoys the feature and is having a hard time figuring out what there is to hate about it.
I don't hate the bar, I hate the lack of a button to easily navigate up to the parent directory.
It's not a bad idea and possibly even worth pursuing. One of my little favorite things about frameworks like rails is how much effort was put into making human readable URIs: http://www.foobar.com/products/kitchen/blenders/1 , in most cases working your way up say to foobar.com/products/kitchen "does the right thing". I also like how easy this guy's idea would be to implement in a framework like rails. By that I mean…
Better to keep the breadcrumb there I say
This is a well-intentioned but terrible idea. This idea fails even on its own, since it presumes that URLs have structure, even within a particular site. So if you want to add a new page, even a one-off for a special occasion, then you have to start thinking about where it fits in your ad hoc URL/navigation scheme, too. Also, if you want to redesign navigation, you have to change all your URLs. URLs are brilliant bec…
It's not a bad idea and possibly even worth pursuing. One of my little favorite things about frameworks like rails is how much effort was put into making human readable URIs: http://www.foobar.com/products/kitchen/blenders/1 , in most cases working your way up say to foobar.com/products/kitchen "does the right thing". I also like how easy this guy's idea would be to implement in a framework like rails. By that I mean…
Us developers get a hard on when we create these pretty urls, but I recently switched an app to have nice urls and not one user mentioned anything - to them, navigation is in the application, not the url. Better to keep the breadcrumb there I say
But other users appreciate the nice URLs. Take reddit users refering to subreddits as "/r/subredditname" or 4Chan users going by "/X/". Of course these are more technically inclined users, but in many cases probably only marginally so.
Here are a jumble of quick thoughts, please don't take them as the opinion of the team:
1. The reason we didn't pursue anything like this is because sites are easily capable of doing it themselves in their own UI - the URL bar itself needs to come with expected behaviors, and when sites are able to overload it, it becomes more unpredictable. Standardized web UI has been a dream for many years, but the chaotic cacophony of the web is where all the beauty and innovation lies. Though it's a long way from the old ideals of User Agents, a modern browser's job is to get out of the way.
2. Windows Explorer is also able to get away with this style of UI because most people rarely type anything in that field; in the case of the browser, people are typing things in there all the time. Conflating menu-based and text-based navigation is hard.
3. Even though people are generally familiar with the structure of their own filesystem, navigating through it using the breadcrumb-menu interface is somewhat foreign - people don't like to think about sibling pages, especially for pages elsewhere in the stack. This becomes worse when you're dealing with random websites, where you don't know the layout of each.
4. Many websites don't map to a standardized navigation - products can exist in multiple categories, and sites like Wikipedia completely mess with the notion of tree-based structures. Building a notion of site structure into the browser was too prescriptive (see rant at end of point 1).
This is a well-intentioned but terrible idea. This idea fails even on its own, since it presumes that URLs have structure, even within a particular site. So if you want to add a new page, even a one-off for a special occasion, then you have to start thinking about where it fits in your ad hoc URL/navigation scheme, too. Also, if you want to redesign navigation, you have to change all your URLs. URLs are brilliant bec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't hate the bar, I hate the lack of a button to easily navigate up to the parent directory.
Alt+Up Arrow takes you up one directory. Annoyingly though, Alt+Down does not descend into the currently highlighted directory, instead Enter does.