Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yaggo | Hacker News Reader

> "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 cryptic syntax, e.g. "web:com.google/path/to/resource". (Yes, I'm aware of the historical reasons for the current syntax.)

View on HN

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 world is nice because it's imperfect. :)

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

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.

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).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com