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

uxmag.com

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

#61

Post by itgoon »

Goronmon wrote: post #10
vidar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit that I and most programmer types that I know hate that feature but maybe its helpful for those less tech savvy.

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 didn't like it at first, but took the opportunity to spend time getting to know it.

IMO, it is a better way of navigating around. If I'm wanting to go a child of a folder three levels up, I just click the little arrow next to the appropriate parent, then choose the child. As opposed to up-up-up-scroll-click.

Plus, I still have the option of manually editing it, if I so choose (but that takes an extra click).

It took me forever to notice the "search" box, though. That's another really nice feature, once you get used to it.

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

#62

Post by feral »

Groxx wrote: post #43
feral wrote: post #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…

> and its taken too long to train users to this level to just throw it away. Users have been trained? Since when? Though I do agree this is likely to only make things worse in that area.

Trained in the sense that, over time, many of them have learned, or read or been told to pay attention to the URL for security reasons. They are trained by their friends, by blogs, websites, (my bank website frequently reminds me to check the URL), articles in print media, etc.

Now, this doesn't mean users won't still be conned. But its important not to be blase about the worth of that accumulated knowledge. It takes a lot of time - and cases of fraud - before knowledge like "I should check the URL" filters down to the average user. This knowledge, having been thus accumulated, shouldn't be casually discarded, or undervalued, by those of us who do computers for a living. Its hard to train users to follow security procedures at the best of times, without changing the rules.

Examples of what I'm talking about, from a quick Google: "look for indicators that the site is secure, like a lock icon on the browser’s status bar or a URL for a website that begins https:" http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt127.shtm

"A phishing site may look exactly like the real site, but the URL will look strange." http://www.ehow.com/how_5236627_avoid-online-like-fake-paypa...

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/phishing/spoof.aspx

There are a plenty of examples of similar articles.

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

#63

Post by Yaggo »

nanairo wrote: post #52
Yaggo wrote: post #46

> "Before I go on, it's worth mentioning that many websites are already moving towards practically URL-free navigation in the form of Java- and Flash-based input and navigation." That's simply bad design. I would say opposite – the trend is towards friendly URLs. And seriously, I don't remember seeing Java-based (applet) navigations since 1999. While I love the URLs in string form, I agree that they could have less c…

What was the historical reason? I know that originally the actual domain name was written from "largest" to "smallest": com.google, for example. I find my perfectionist side slightly annoyed by the current form, but then if we ever change it we should move to year-month-day too, and putting the currency symbol after the number, and use decimals everywhere (no more hours but centi-days ^_^)... oh well, I guess the wor…

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881278

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

#64

Post by Groxx »

feral wrote: post #62
Groxx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and its taken too long to train users to this level to just throw it away. Users have been trained? Since when? Though I do agree this is likely to only make things worse in that area.

Trained in the sense that, over time, many of them have learned, or read or been told to pay attention to the URL for security reasons. They are trained by their friends, by blogs, websites, (my bank website frequently reminds me to check the URL), articles in print media, etc. Now, this doesn't mean users won't still be conned. But its important not to be blase about the worth of that accumulated knowledge. It takes…

I know of one non-geek who spotted a strange URL and actually looked deeper. My mom, who's rapidly improving her computer skills - she noticed a login redirected to a massively different URL. Missed that it was still the same domain, but now she understands the parts of a URL better.

This, from years of being the geek-as-tech-support for quite a few people. Non-geeks (ie, those who do not understand URLs to a minimum-safe degree) who even look at the URL while they browse are, in my experience, exceedingly rare. None I've even seen notice the "revoked certificate" flag, and many people browsing at school have clicked right through the phishing / scam / malware warnings to get to their game.

People. Do. Not. Understand. URLs. There's no mapping to the real world, certainly no obvious mapping, and understanding how they work and what's important requires far more tech knowledge than the average person has.

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

#65

Post by Groxx »

xal wrote: post #6
dstein wrote: post #4

I would just eliminate the URL bar and the back button entirely. These concepts are relics from the Internet 1.0 age and no longer have the correct meaning. Some sort of bookmark/search/wiki replacement navigation system needs to be developed.

I totally disagree, the back button is the single greatest UI improvement of the web. There are a lot of non tech savvy people out there who are so afraid of breaking things that they won't even open context menus in Word without saving their document first. All of those use facebook and the web like champs because they can never totally screw up because the back button takes them to safety. Don't forget, many grew u…

Very much agree, especially as it imposes stateless behaviors in websites, and as so many sites have poor navigation (even as bad as different on every page).

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

#66

Post by Yaggo »

daleharvey wrote: post #57
xyzzyz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't, actually. We have http://google.com/path/ . The URI scheme, the ' http:// part, that is, is actually meaningless and could be replaced with shorter and meaningful 'web:', which was, I believe, the main point of a poster you were replying to.

I think the main point of the poster was about the ordering of the address, subdomains and paths screw up ordering because they arent linear, its like american dates. some.sub.domain.com/and/a/path vs .com/domain/sub/some/and/a/path

Both were my mains points, but I see the "http:// problem bigger. It's too unpronounceable prefix for every-day use (because of combination of letters h+t+t+p and three punctuation marks after that!), so people simply skip it. Because normal people still need some standard identification string to recognize a website address, the site owners configure the "www." subdomain for that purpose, although it's totally unnecessary component (but made sense historically when the www was just one marginal service among others).

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

#67

Post by bruceboughton »

xyzzyz wrote: post #56
bruceboughton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or google.com/path/to/resource which we already have...

We don't, actually. We have http://google.com/path/ . The URI scheme, the ' http:// part, that is, is actually meaningless and could be replaced with shorter and meaningful 'web:', which was, I believe, the main point of a poster you were replying to.

My point was that http:// is entirely superfluous - your browser doesn't need it and no one ever says it.

In most cases, the same is true of www., but sadly not in all.

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