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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

I'm in complete agreement except this:

> Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.

I would say it's even worse now. Many people's mental model is "I type it into Google and they take me there" or "I share this clickable text around and don't have to type anything".

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I think their use case is worse, but their mental model probably includes other TLDs - or at least they've probably GONE to other TLDs. Some (More? many? most?) people just prefer to type URLs into Google for some ungodly reason. I watched a junior web designer do it today, and she certainly knows what URLs are; it's just How You Do That. For you and me, it seems like an extra hop, but for her, the extra hop would be to realize "I already know this URL" and override her muscle memory.

Then again, I set up an alias called "gwssh" that goes to our EC2 gateway machine and then to the target machine, and more than once I've typed "gwssh gate" because I'm too "lazy" to type "ssh gate".

I think it's worse in US; over here (UK) people are more used to .co.uk or .org or whatnot.

People don't really know what an URL is. During ealry days of WWW and broadcasting presenters would read the whole thing; aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double you double you double you etc etc. There's still not much awareness of what the bits of an url breakdown to; you still see even the BBC make mistakes about domain names and TLDs.

And I'm always gently disappointed to see URLs delimited by () and not RFC compliant <>.

> And I'm always gently disappointed to see URLs delimited by () and not RFC compliant <>.

Choosing a bracket character that resembles a tag, for use in the case when you are definitively trying NOT to create an HTML tag, seems a misguided choice in the RFC.

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