131–140 of 163 posts
I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
I don't see the address of buildings I'm in even when I stand in front of it on the street.
But seriously, what are you trying to say, that we need to make software match our contemporary physical experience? No, we can do better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People without a technical background could accept a browser that doesn't display an URL at all. Just put a nice big Button with the Google-Logo somewhere, which for many people is "The internet" and they are happy. And anyone claiming otherwise should riddle me this: How do most non-technical people in the world access "awesomepageireallylike.something"? That's right, they click into the address bar, start typing un…
URL is a central concept in web browsing. Hiding it from users goes against the main usability principle that the user should understand what's going on. One does not need a technical background to understand URLs. Browser hiding URLs is like an OS hiding file system structure from users, because files and directories are "too technioal" for them.
> URL is a central concept in web browsing.
Two responses, depending on one's mood:
1. So?
2. Resource identifiers—which URLs are—are a central concept to information science, scholarship, and society and culture.
Aside from the (admittedly often irrational) tendency of some non-technical people to strike a pose of helplessness,* you also end up with technical people making comments like this one: generally taking the stance that it's not too hard to pick this stuff up, with the goal that non-technical people will end up with an appreciation/conception of a URL's technological bones that at least approximately matches the informed mental model of the technical person who is speaking—and who themselves doesn't stop to consider what they themselves have got wrong and are possibly continuing to do wrong by society wrt their role in (negatively) shaping the information architecture of the world around them.
* See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38277553>
Dan Luu famously doesn't have timestamps on the blog posts, like https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ There is date on the index page Jan - 2016, however it's not obvious from the content page. I think the argument is that the content should be corrected if it's outdated. So, it shouldn't matter when it was written.
When I was doing research, I was bothered by the date not being anywhere in papers (PDFs). You'd have to search the title of the paper with the names of the authors on the internet, figure out which version you are reading and find out the year of the publication using dblp [1] or finding out in which journal or conference it was published. Yet, it's so important to actually know when something was written. [1] https…
With topics like ML and NLP that move fast, even the day/month becomes important, not just the year.
Few things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh, everything's converged on https now, unless you're loading from file (in which case you probably know already). With any other scheme, the browser is going to pop up a massive DANGER WILL ROBINSON that you have to click through. The scheme is rather pointless to display in a browser bar nowadays.
Having a separate scheme for HTTPS was a mistake anyway. TLS should be a transport detail that doesn't change the URL at all just like DNSSEC, IPv6 and QUIC don't change the URL. The browser can still display the negotiated encryption and you need HSTS anyway to fully protect against downgrade attacks - and as older ciphers are broken even that is not going to be enough.
Few things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.
Previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33446662
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that the user should understand what's going on Sure he should. But design maxime of a lot of contemporary software does exactly the opposite: Hiding as much of the "icky techy stuff" from the user as possible. > One does not need a technical background to understand URLs. That's true, but doesn't change the fact that most people don't. For example, how many people know that the domain of an URL is organised right-…
> And now open a contemporary smart phone interface, and show me, without any special tooling, the actual, "physical" file system. Yes, I had phones in mind when writting the above :) > And these things are probably the most successful consumer computing platforms ever. Users don't have better choice in this market.
Off-topic, but is this a typo of "Nix" or a passive-aggressive jab at Julia for blogging about the tedium of actually getting anything to actual work in modern development?