Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

I am in favor of the change. I do not think hiding technical information from non-technical users is a bad thing. Making it impossible for technical users to work it out is the bad thing.

If technical users want their own browser mode, where all these things are readily available, then I'd be all for that.

Clicking on the browser location bar should reveal the full URL. But the noise of the protocol, the www. prefix, and the param string is all irrelevant to the experience of the casual user of web browsers and should indeed be hidden. We're already hiding a ton of stuff from them already, if you want to go see it, you can always "view source".

One argument in the thread was that 'www.pool.ntp.org' and 'pool.ntp.org' go to a website and a nameserver respectively. Nontechnical users will never want to use a web browser to access a nameserver, so there's no UX benefit to distinguishing them. From a URL entry standpoint, it should go to the URL that was typed into the location bar. There isn't a conflict.

It breaks how the web is supposed to function. There is no consensus on the utilization of subdomains and which ones are considered to be trivial. I could write an app which maps usernames to subdomains and Chrome would break this if a user had a username which was in the trivial list. I think Tumblr is a site which does this. It really isn't about technical or non-technical, it is about what subdomains can be used for.

Edit: well I was right, this breaks in the new Chrome, http://m.tumblr.com/ , tumblr usernames on the 'trivial' list are broken.

There's no such thing as "how the web is supposed to function." There is an ideal that the plurality of the early web once sought to chase. There are more ideals that the more commerce-friendly users and creators of the web started to chase.

The norm is always shifting. It's our job as technologists to accommodate how people want to use technology, not to tell them that the way they want to use it is wrong. Because if we try to tell them no, then they're going to use the freedoms we labored so hard to give them to stop listening to us.

> There are more ideals that the more commerce-friendly users and creators of the web started to chase.

What are those?

> It's our job as technologists to accommodate how people want to use technology, not to tell them that the way they want to use it is wrong.

If some kids wish to use the technology to do DDos attacks it doesn't mean we should build it into the browser, the same is true here.

> Because if we try to tell them no,

Just say No to this crap, that's all.

It’s not that technical, though, to people urls are just strings. Why would people care if they can see the www or not? If anything, this is likely to introduce more confusion.

You didn't read far enough:

> "subdomain.www.domain.com" displays as "subdomain.domain.com".

This is very deceiving. This change gives phishers a huge opportunity.

I agree with the spirit of the change, not necessarily every detail of the implementation.

The implementation will definitely need a up to date Public Suffix List. We control a bunch of public suffixes and it's a huge, huge difference if you browse to the address "www.com" or to "com" - or blogger.com and www.blogger.com, or dyndns.org vs. www.dyndns.org. In this case, there are different organizations/persons controlling these.

Should you not know which one you have connected to?

I think an exception list rather than a straight map is all that's needed. If you want to buck the convention, fine, don't expect the browsers to know what you're trying to do, so update this list, which takes 30 days to propagate, and you can have your fun.

True. The www. subdomain has been irrelevant for a very long time now and a great source of confusion for both users and developers who never know how to set their domains.

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