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Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

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Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alt+Up Arrow takes you up one directory. Annoyingly though, Alt+Down does not descend into the currently highlighted directory, instead Enter does.

Backspace also takes you up one directory, I didn't know about Alt+Up.

Actually backspace is the equivalent of pushing the back button. Which is often similar but can give different results. Boy I miss OSX sometimes :)

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#32
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alt+Up Arrow takes you up one directory. Annoyingly though, Alt+Down does not descend into the currently highlighted directory, instead Enter does.

Backspace also takes you up one directory, I didn't know about Alt+Up.

Backspace takes you "Back". If you open C:\ and then click on Downloads, pressing Backspace will take you to C:\ and pressing Alt-Up will take you to C:\Users\YourUserName. Of course, if you are currently in C:\ and open the Windows folder, pressing either Alt-Up or Backspace will open C:\ again.

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#33
post #18

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.

As a long-time user of the Up button, I completely agree.

With the new system, the parent button (i.e. "Up", as NumberFiveAlive pointed out) is always in a different location, labeled with different text. How confusing! Microsoft replaced the notion of "I want to go up" with "I want to open folder X". Great for new users, not great for me.

The new system makes a lot of sense for people who don't understand nested file-systems and just want to open Folder X... "oh look, there it is, click". Also, the old Up button doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of a hierarchy laid out horizontally, so I can see why Microsoft would want to revamp their interface.

For those of us who do understand that directories contain other directories, the option to enable the Up button again would be a welcome "new" addition to the address bar. Sometimes it's more convenient to click on a button than to reach for a hotkey.

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#34
Even if optionally disabled, hiding the resource location seems very dubious while the breadcrumb structure isn't applicable to all sites. I would much prefer that sites be developed with good REST techniques, with the goal of making easy to understand URLs. Over time I think more sites like Amazon will get on this and make cleaner URL structures.

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#35
post #18

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.

Classic shell will give you back your up button as well as the path name in the window title: http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

You can pick and choose what options you want. My explorer is currently configured to be a bit of a cross between Windows 7 and XP.

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#36
post #17

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…

> "Training users to recognize URLs is vitally important"

This raises an interesting side question. What kinds of things should present day computer/net users be aware of? In other words what would you consider 'basic training' for your average user?

The reason I find this question interesting is because I'm sure many years ago that a grasp of the command line was considered important (but then 'average user' also meant something different).

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#37
post #27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It depends on your userbase. Completely non technical users have completely blocked out URLs, they might as well not even exist to them. They'll even go to foo.com by typing "foo.com" into Google. 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 ma…

> or 4Chan users going by "/X/"

When will the nightmare of capitalization end? I've never even seen that second form before.

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#38
This won't work for two reasons:

1) Legacy: URLs are fundamental to the way the the web is architected at too low of a level to change. We could change the browser to not display them, or display something else, but trying to make a web-wide change to put the prettiness in the URL isn't going to happen.

2) Security: There are already many attacks involving using unicode strings to allow an evil website masquerade as a good one. The URL is the one way a user knows whether they are on mybank.com or evilbank.com While its not a sufficient security system, its the best we've got so far; and its taken too long to train users to this level to just throw it away.

If we were starting again from scratch, bundling better navigational metadata would be worth doing - but thats just wishful thinking, and only the tip of the iceberg for what we might change.

Re: Making the URL bar useful again: Where the Breadcrumb should have been all along

#39
post #3

This UI would be similar to Windows 7 Windows Explorer's location bar, which shows "breadcrumbs" of libraries or folder directories by default, but changes to actual filepath upon click.

The first thing I do when I install Ubuntu and open Nautilus is to turn this feature off. It's so much faster to type "~/Scripts/some/hierarchy" than it is to click through that. Then again, I (probably like most of you) believe in the commandline.
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