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Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

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Re: Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

#41

Post by andybak »

politician wrote: post #38

Hiding the URL means hiding, or encapsulating, HTTP(S) from the user. Eventually, paving the way for a replacement of that venerable document-centric protocol for something more app-centric. That's my bet anyway.

By "my bet" do you mean:

1. "Google has a master plan and are gently testing the water to see how far they can push it"

or 2. "I think this is where trends will eventually carry us"

(2) is quite reasonable and (1) is a conspiracy theory that I personally think is a little absurd.

Re: Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

#43

Post by Semaphor »

junto wrote: post #27

I hope I can always get access to the URL. I frequently have to switch the 'smart' geo tracking language selection in the querystring from de-DE that some shortsighted developer thought meant Germany === German to en-US or en-GB. I'm looking at you Google as the worst offender. I swear that some developers have never left the US. Geo location != preferred language. Accept-Language header in my browser is telling you…

The accept-language header is dead. It's simply ignored by every site. Some crappy sites like Origin even make it impossible to set the language to anything but German even by changing the URL directly. Google took years to even allow me to manually set everything to English, until about 1-2 years ago some settings were impossible for me to reach in English even when everything was set to English.

It's just like with Windows, applications use the location instead of the OS language to chose what language to default to.

L10n is broken. And no one seems to have any real interest in fixing it. The tools are there but they get ignored by pretty much everyone.

Re: Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

#45

Post by thesash »

fixermark wrote: post #22

I can't agree at all with the author's basic premise, which makes it hard to agree with the rest of the article. >> URLs are the building blocks of the web. The web has lots of building blocks (hyperlinks, requests, the underlying protocols, HTML, and on the modern web: Javascript and XmlHttpRequest). We hide most of that implementation detail from the user because it's non-essential to the task at hand. How essentia…

What if you read that statement as "URLs are the basic interface of the web"?

Re: Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

#47

Post by thezilch »

thesash wrote: post #45
fixermark wrote: post #22

I can't agree at all with the author's basic premise, which makes it hard to agree with the rest of the article. >> URLs are the building blocks of the web. The web has lots of building blocks (hyperlinks, requests, the underlying protocols, HTML, and on the modern web: Javascript and XmlHttpRequest). We hide most of that implementation detail from the user because it's non-essential to the task at hand. How essentia…

What if you read that statement as "URLs are the basic interface of the web"?

But they're not. Hyperlinks, shortcuts, or similar are. To most people, the internet is an icon on their desktop, that goes to the Google/Yahoo/Bing, with which you can search for Facebook. You're going to be hard pressed to teach this majority on the rules of parsing a URL to eek out the domain before you can even begin to teach them which domains to look out and what not to do with those unrecognized.

Re: Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

#48

Post by xxs »

Semaphor wrote: post #43
junto wrote: post #27

I hope I can always get access to the URL. I frequently have to switch the 'smart' geo tracking language selection in the querystring from de-DE that some shortsighted developer thought meant Germany === German to en-US or en-GB. I'm looking at you Google as the worst offender. I swear that some developers have never left the US. Geo location != preferred language. Accept-Language header in my browser is telling you…

The accept-language header is dead. It's simply ignored by every site. Some crappy sites like Origin even make it impossible to set the language to anything but German even by changing the URL directly. Google took years to even allow me to manually set everything to English, until about 1-2 years ago some settings were impossible for me to reach in English even when everything was set to English. It's just like with…

Geo-location by IP is one of most horrid abomination ever created. Try a road trip in Europe, every single day google believes I speak/read/understand a different language. If that's not bad enough, living in a country where one doesn't speak the local language basically means not using the service.

Stuff like .../?hl=en may help indeed (but it has to be put manually.

Re: Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

#49

Post by politician »

andybak wrote: post #41
politician wrote: post #38

Hiding the URL means hiding, or encapsulating, HTTP(S) from the user. Eventually, paving the way for a replacement of that venerable document-centric protocol for something more app-centric. That's my bet anyway.

By "my bet" do you mean: 1. "Google has a master plan and are gently testing the water to see how far they can push it" or 2. "I think this is where trends will eventually carry us" (2) is quite reasonable and (1) is a conspiracy theory that I personally think is a little absurd.

Thanks, but yes, I think the long-term trend takes us away from documents and towards integrated web-delivered apps. Today's hack of JavaScript, DOM, CSS, and Ajax will eventually be smoothed into a simpler arrangement more suited for apps than documents. I think technologies like Dart, SPDY, HSTS, and Web Components foreshadow that future to various degrees.

Re: Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

#50

Post by downer74 »

dannyr wrote: post #28

I observed a bunch of high-schoolers using the web. They go to Google to visit a site. They don't type URLs. They go to google.com, enter "Facebook" and click on the 1st result. Remember the Facebook Login fiasco? http://readwrite.com/2010/02/11/how_google_failed_internet_m... Google showed this post when people searched for "Facebook Login": http://readwrite.com/2010/02/10/facebook_wants_to_be_your_on...

...and that's because they are fucking stupid.

You know what I recently observed? A bunch of kindergarteners fastening their shoes to their feet with velcro straps.

Their shoes also had little blinky lights on them, so that cars don't run them over, when they chase a soccer ball into the street. Let make all the adults wear velcro shoes with blinky lights on them too.

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