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Burying the URL

allenpike.com

1–10 of 376 posts

Re: Burying the URL

#2
It seems that the latest Canary has toggled the flag back off for now. If you're curious to try the feature so you can provide feedback on its future, go to chrome://flags and turn on "Enable origin chip in Omnibox".

Re: Burying the URL

#3
post #2

It seems that the latest Canary has toggled the flag back off for now. If you're curious to try the feature so you can provide feedback on its future, go to chrome://flags and turn on "Enable origin chip in Omnibox".

Thank god.

Re: Burying the URL

#4
>Native apps, meanwhile, have been fairly dismal in terms of linkability, creating silos of content that have no sensical URL.

It's a really excellent point.

Conversely, you could argue that URLs are valuable to search engines as an indicator of relevance, organization and what can be crawled.

Apps don't merely siloize their content—they break the most powerful way in recent history to decide if it's valuable.

Re: Burying the URL

#5
If you click the chip, it reveals the URL, too.

May not be great, but it's not completely gone (which the article seems to indicate).

Re: Burying the URL

#7
post #2

It seems that the latest Canary has toggled the flag back off for now. If you're curious to try the feature so you can provide feedback on its future, go to chrome://flags and turn on "Enable origin chip in Omnibox".

'interesting' flags are usually tested with various segments.. so some people will see a flag set to a given value, others a different one.

Re: Burying the URL

#8

I wouldn't mind this if it had breadcrumbs. For example, http://example.com/path/to/file.html would be four buttons (chips?) [example.com][path][to][file.html]

The problem with that is that most of the buttons would take you to pages that don't exist. I guess the browser could crawl them first, but what would really be the point?

Re: Burying the URL

#9

I wouldn't mind this if it had breadcrumbs. For example, http://example.com/path/to/file.html would be four buttons (chips?) [example.com][path][to][file.html]

URLs are supposed to be atomic; there's no guarantee that truncating a url is going to lead you anyplace useful. The fact that it often does started as an accident of early implementations (hey, show a directory listing by default) followed by a security backfill (damn, directory is showing; better drop an index.html in there) which lead to a convention (better put something meaningful at each level of the url, because people will try them and we don't want 404 errors.)

I don't think the convention can be assumed to be true for any website to the degree needed to implement a feature like you suggest. There would be too many errors when people click on those buttons, and people would blame the browser, not the website.

Re: Burying the URL

#10
At first I was concerned by this, but as long as the URL is accessible - by clicking the domain chip - I could see this being a good thing. Most non power users never directly manipulate URLs, so there's no real need to display them so prominently. The domain on the other hand is important, and showing only it without the rest of the URL serves to significantly emphasize it.

As long as there remains a power user toggle to show the full URL, seems like a positive change. Of course, I may be missing some edge case.

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